


Silence = Death

by aingeal



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 1980s, AIDS victim Bucky, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amputee Bucky Barnes, Explicit in later chapters, Implied/Referenced Consensual Underage Sex, M/M, Memories, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pre-war flashbacks, This is going to get upsetting, This will eventually lead to Hydra!Cap, Unhappy Ending, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 06:41:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3681897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aingeal/pseuds/aingeal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 1982. Ronald Reagan has dug Captain America out of the ice to win the Cold War for him, but Steve has other ideas.</p><p>Bucky Barnes was rescued from the Alps back in 1944. When he came home he'd lost his arm and Steve was gone. He's gotten used to being alone. </p><p>Now Steve is back, but the AIDS epidemic is beginning to tighten its grip on America, and it's going to destroy the hopeful new life they're hoping to embark on in this crazy decade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> NB that I put a fairly minimal amount of effort into making this historically and medically accurate, so if you're a stickler for that kind of thing don't say I didn't warn you.

In 1982 an average of one to two new cases of AIDS was diagnosed in the USA every day.

Bucky Barnes was one of them.

In 1982 Bucky was coming up to 60 years old. He had the traces of the super soldier serum in his body still, though, and he looked great and not a day over 40. He wore his hair with its streaky grey long, maybe in a ponytail, and he wore a lot of black and sometimes leather, and the young guys went crazy for him. They liked his tough strong hand and jawline, and that they never knew where he’d be, where he was going and when they’d see him next. He was on the periphery of multiple scenes across both seaboards, but made his home in Brooklyn still.

In the 1980s New York was a dangerous place, but no-one ever bothered the tough looking white guy; he’d been in the neighborhood longer’n anyone and had seen it change through a couple generations, and he would chat with the old folks and know the names of the little kids and the young guys were a bit scared of him. Some people thought he was a vampire or something, because he never seemed to get any older than 40 and he’d been there so long and sometimes he was there and sometimes he wasn’t. And there were the rumors that you really didn’t want to meet that guy in a knife fight, for all he was a fag and only had one arm.

Those days Bucky wasn’t so into the scenes, and though he was a recognizable face in Greenwich Village he didn’t go dancing and he didn’t like bars all that much, but he knew the places to cruise and when he was in the city there were few nights when his bed was empty, or if it was then that was because he wasn’t in it either, was out in an alley or down on the docks, not alone. He liked it now it was the ‘80s and there were so many guys around, in stomach-skimming tshirts and little jeans, just waiting to be picked up, and he nowadays didn’t have to risk set-ups and getting beat up so much as in previous decades. He missed the danger sometimes, because that, according to Bucky, was the best part of hookups and their main point. Since he came back from the war alone, he’d lived his life flying on the knife-edge of danger, seeking it out and relishing it. He’d been in plenty of fights, mostly with fag-haters or guys who thought they could take him for whatever reason just because he was a cripple with only one arm. They all learned, however, that he was not to be messed with, that his one hand could wreak enough pain all by itself.

The night he caught AIDS he was in San Francisco. He’d hopped trains and hitched rides to get there, and he’d had a lay in every city he stopped in, so it could’ve come from one of them, but in ’82 the epidemic was still centered in the big cities, on the coasts, and in retrospect he doubted the guy working the pump at a gas station outside of Des Moines would’ve had much to do with anyone who would have been part of the scenes that were slowly being eaten by the new cancer. That lay had been a corn-eating wholesome midwest kid, and he’d probably never been fucked before. He’d made Bucky smile and feel young again.

So he’d never heard of the disease before he got to San Francisco, because he was on the edges of the scenes and didn’t care for gossip, and even if he had he probably wouldn’t have done much different. He didn’t care much if he lived or died, and the idea of some strange sickness would’ve spiced his recklessness. But when he got to the big city on the coast he found some of his friends gone, and that did grieve him. He’d been hoping to crash at Frankie Antioni’s place, but he found out from word on the street that Frankie was dead, had died in months from some terrible wasting disease. And in the nights he spent in ‘Cisco he heard of more guys he’d known who had been struck down, and he heard nothing but whispers and rumors and people’s fears of this disease, that only affected gay men. Bucky thought that sounded dumb, because how could a disease know who was gay and who wasn’t?

Whatever it was, it made the mood in the whole city weird, people talking in huddles and looking fearfully at each other, as if trying to work out who’d be singled out for death next, and there was less freedom for hooking up than last time he’d been there. Guys were scared. But Bucky wanted a guy so he found a guy, about thirty years old, who had the dead eyes of someone who doesn’t give a fuck about staying safe, probably a junkie. He’d seen him sitting at a bar alone, shaved head and ripped tshirt and stained jeans, nursing a beer with an air of having nothing much more in his life than that one drink, and all Bucky’d had to do was sit down beside him and look him in the eye and the guy had drained his beer and followed him outside without a word. He didn’t even take a second look at Bucky’s empty sleeve, like most guys did before Bucky did things to them that made them stop caring to be curious. He’d let Bucky take him and he’d seemed to enjoy it, but then he’d asked him for money. Bucky didn’t like being someone’s trick; he didn’t like what doing that work did to guys, and he preferred to feel that someone wanted to fuck him because they wanted to, rather than because they needed money for their next hit. But he gave the guy seventy bucks- all he had in his wallet- and told him to get himself something to eat as well as his fix with it, as a favor to him. The guy had just taken the money and made his exit without a word.

Bucky had gone back to the couch he was crashing on feeling disappointed and cursing miserable San Francisco. That kind of thing happened way less back in New York. This trip was a bust, with the prostitutes and the fear of this disease, and some of his best friends dead, and he hitched all the way down to LA and rode a train home the next day, and decided not to go back West for a while. The disease was eating its way into the Lower West Side by the time he got back, though, and Bucky wouldn’t have been able to run from it even if it wasn’t already breeding in his veins.

The man Bucky had fucked in the alley behind the bar- his name was Graham Simpson- would be dead within six months. He’d contracted HIV from a dirty needle months before his liaison with Bucky, and was already progressing to the latter stages of AIDS by then. He didn’t become part of the official statistics of the epidemic though, because he was a junkie and he’d died of an overdose rather than the disease that was ravaging him, and he’d died in a squat and his body had been unceremoniously dumped and the city dealt with it, and no-one cared to look into the cause of death too closely. Just another dead fag junkie.

But Bucky Barnes would have had cause to care, because he caught the disease that would claim his life from the dead man Graham Simpson that night in San Francisco, and he would have only months to live from that night on.

 

*

 

One of the reasons that the Reagan administration turned a blind eye to the epidemic slowly spreading like a cancer through the cities of the USA, other than the fact that they didn’t give a damn for the kinds of people the disease was killing, was that they were busy digging around in the Arctic for Captain America. Ronald Reagan, more than a little mad, had got it into his head that the only way to win the Cold War and defeat the evil empire of the soviets was to resurrect the greatest American hero, the man who had saved the world from the Nazis and would be sure to do it again against the cursed Communists. The plan was a little hazy, but there was some kind of mythological symbolism to it, and Reagan was shoveling money at the project. He was sure that Captain America was alive out there, and, much to the fatigue of his long-suffering advisers, he was proven right.

The ruddy-faced President personally was present at the Captain’s bedside when he was brought out of the medically-induced coma he’d been kept in after they’d melted him out of the block of ice; having chiseled it in one piece out of an ice floe and shipped him home in it, in state, with the stars and stripes draped over it like the coffin of a fallen serviceman and his shield atop it.

Steve woke up to that florid face and unconvincing dye job and had started screaming, and the doctors had firmly insisted that Reagan leave the ward. Then they had put Steve back under so they could wake him slowly and acclimatize him gently to finding himself alive in the wrong decade.

A young doctor with a subversive streak had made sure Steve was provided with a variety of different sources of information in his rehabilitation packets, along with the propaganda-strained ones that the administration recommended, and so Steve was able to come to a more fully rounded understanding of the America he had been woken up in. And he decided that it stank. He was pretty much heartbroken to see how his country and his beloved city had turned out in the past forty years, and he was deeply, instinctively distrustful of the overtures that Reagan’s representatives made towards him, because it seemed to him that Ronald Reagan embodied everything that Captain America was supposed to stand up against, and he would have refused the invitation to meet the president in person if he’d had a choice.

He didn’t have a choice though, so he had to suffer through a state lunch at the White House and then a televised rally to re-introduce him to the nation. In the garish television footage of the early 1980s Steve appears only briefly on the banner- and flag-festooned balcony, looking every inch the anachronism in the ceremonial uniform and slicked-back hair the TV people had insisted he wore. (For the Republicans he was supposed to represent a return to good old-fashioned conservative WWII values, and they wanted to be sure he looked the part.)

A tiny figure on the screen, Steve shakes Reagan’s hand, raises his hand and waves to the crowds, left, center, and right in turn, then shakes some more people’s hands- army majors and some senators- waves once more, and exits stage left. He was strongly encouraged to prepare a speech for the occasion, but he stubbornly told everyone who tried to make him that he didn’t have anything to say, and on the day he made it off that balcony just as quickly as he could, with the screams of the crowds ringing in his ears. The whole event reminded him, hideously uncomfortably, of the footage of the Nuremburg rallies that he remembered he had watched with a sick hatred back in the ‘30s, and he wanted nothing to do with it.

America went wild for its resurrected hero, and his image was splashed across newspapers and newsreels, and comic book sales were doing better than they had since the Golden Age. They were going to make a movie about him, but he refused to sign the rights to his real life away, so instead a whole industry sprung up dredging old comic-book plots out of the Marvel archives and turning them into kids’ TV cartoons, merchandising lines, action figures and memorabilia. In them Captain America has a white shiny smile and a tacky shiny costume, and he punches out countless thinly-disguised Soviet goons and brings down the thinly-disguised Berlin Wall and marches into thinly-disguised Moscow with a smiling converted Russian girl on his arm, and all the children cheer as the stars and stripes fly, a synthy version of “The Star-Spangled Man” plays, and the credits roll.

Steve sometimes watched the cartoons, and the advertising placements that had an actor playing him shilling mass-produced crap to a catchy jingle, slumped in front of the colossal TV on his vinyl couch in the Manhattan apartment the administration had given him- supposedly as remuneration for the extraordinary service he had given his country, but really as a bribe to get him to agree to their terms. The neighborhood here wasn’t really a neighborhood, it was too affluent and nobody knew each other like they would’ve back in the old days, and everything was too slick and shiny. Most of his neighbors were stockbrokers or ad-men, and Steve hated them all. The Greed is Good generation. Steve couldn’t believe America had come to this.

He had taken to riding the subway, blending into the graffitied and begrimed background in a bomber jacket and baseball cap, just riding around and watching the real faces and real lives of the real New York, out in the Bronx and Harlem and Queens. They made everything more real. They made him feel real, a feeling he was struggling to find in this day and age.

He didn’t have too much else to do with his days, other than watch the cartoons that made him feel more unreal than ever, and ride the subway. His shield was gathering dust propped in the hallway of his apartment; he couldn’t think of a single thing to do with it. He’d stepped down from military service, and there wasn’t any way anyone could find of stopping him- he’d technically been in active service for nearly a half-century and nobody could deny he’d earned the right to retire. The administration had invited him to several meetings and committees, trying to bring him in as a special advisor, or special agent, and various branches of the armed services and even the CIA had made overtures to him. They’d bribed him with this apartment and a pension way bigger than any other Vet would’ve gotten, and a nice vintage motorbike too, and let him know that he could name his price, if only he’d serve again. Steve had refused all of it. And when they’d escalated to vague threats, of taking his passport away, of questioning his service record, even of hints that he could be suspected of faking his death and serving as an informer to the USSR, if people wanted to suspect him, he’d just laughed.

Nothing they could do could seriously hurt him, because he took nothing they’d given him for granted, and it was enough to just be so unexpectedly alive that he didn’t need anything else. Although, saying that, he felt that being alive was taking some getting used to. He lived in his life like his own lodger, with just enough clothes to get by, and the barest of necessities in his kitchen (though he ate mostly takeout regardless), barely creasing his polyester sheets when he lay still and sleepless in bed at night, spending hours gazing out at the street below his apartment through the slatted blinds, haunting the subway like a ghost. He worked out a lot, too, though the modern concept of “the gym” with its electronic equipment and blaring techno had frightened him and he stuck to a set of free weights he kept in his useless spare bedroom. He thought of looking up some people he used to know, but the idea was too depressing. They’d all be already dead or on their way out, by now.

So he lived like this, barely there in some ways, but intensely alive in others- experiencing all the things he’d never thought he’d live to see, like the new technology and the hilarious outfits people wore these days, and sinking himself in simple pleasures like coffee and spring leaves in Washington Square Park, that he was overjoyed to still be here to enjoy. The days passed and he began to get used to the 1980s. And then, one day in early summer, he remembered Bucky. When Steve went down, he’d presumed Bucky was dead. But if Steve could come back from the dead, couldn’t Bucky have? He had received the super soldier serum, too, after all. Steve needed to double-check what happened.

 

*

 

Bucky Barnes, Steve concluded after a few weeks, really didn’t want to be remembered. It had been easy enough to track down his service records in the public library, as well as the sensational newspaper headlines from the war years. They told the same story: Sergeant James Barnes, Howling Commando, went missing in action in ’44 on a top-secret op under Captain America in the Swiss Alps, presumed dead. Then- and this had hit Steve like a physical blow when he read it- only a few days after Captain America had taken the Hydra bombs down with him into the Arctic and practically single-handedly won the war, a search-and-rescue mission had uncovered Barnes’s body, buried in snow and severely mangled, but miraculously alive. There’d been quite the media frenzy once he’d been flown back home, because the story was a good one and added piquancy to the satisfyingly heroic tragedy of Captain America’s self-sacrifice, and profiles of Bucky had proliferated, most of them not containing much more than a regurgitation of the bare biographical facts and the touching tale of his and Steve Rogers’s boyhood friendship. Steve read that he’d recovered miraculously from his ordeal, though he had suffered the full amputation of his left arm, which had been crushed in the fall. After it was announced that Barnes had made a full recovery and been discharged from military service, however, the records go quiet. The trail vanished. No-one had done a profile of this extra-special veteran since, not even in the anniversary years of Captain America’s “death”, and he hadn’t become someone famous. All trace of Bucky Barnes had vanished from public life by ’47 or so.

Despite this, Steve was sure that Bucky was still alive. He had to be out there somewhere. He could just tell. Since he’d read that Bucky had survived the fall and come back to America, he’d known in his heart that he had lived all these years and was a refugee in the future, just like Steve. Steve’s chest had clenched at the thought; Bucky must have been so lonely. If Steve’s hunch was correct, then the small amount of serum in Bucky’s body would have preserved him almost as well as Steve’d been preserved, and he couldn’t imagine him being anything like the other WWII Vets still left around, sunning themselves on the beach at Staten Island or walking slowly in the park, playing draughts and chess-if they hadn’t all moved to Florida.

So he left the archives and the official story, and he went underground, hoping to find Bucky through intuition, letting his memory lead him. He wandered round all of Brooklyn, visiting his own old apartment block, somehow still standing, and the building where the Barnes’s had lived. No sign. He went to where the shipping office that Bucky had worked at had been, but that had gotten demolished some time in the ‘70s, and anyway, Buck had hated that job, so it would have been unlikely Steve would’ve found him lurking around there 40 years later. With his heart in his throat he went to the boardwalk where he and Bucky had had their first kiss looking out over the Hudson, one starlit night in the late ‘30s. One of Steve’s most cherished memories. The boardwalk was still there, but disused and boarded up, mostly, and peopled by the truly destitute: the homeless, the schizophrenic and the dipsomaniac, and, increasingly, the HIV+. Steve’d gotten used to his heart being hammered by the changes to the city of his memories, that he was faced with so abruptly every single day, but this was by far the most brutal. He thought of the golden Brooklyn afternoons here before the war, when lovers had strolled arm in arm and little kids had scampered and played among the booths and stolen pennies to ride the fairground rides. It had felt like it would have lasted forever, and his and Bucky’s love, their secret and delicious love, had seemed eternal. All lost and gone forever now.

He’d gone back to the apartment in Manhattan he could never quite think of as home, feeling discouraged and disappointed, and questioning for the first time whether he might not be kind of kidding himself that he would be able to find Bucky, even if he was still alive. It was a good thing he didn’t give up on that miserable evening, though, because the only reason that Steve hadn’t seen Bucky in their old neighborhood that day was because on that particular day Bucky was making his way back to New York after a short spell in Atlantic City. But thankfully Steve wasn’t deterred, just doubtful, and the next day he went back to stand unobtrusively on a corner intersection between his and Bucky’s old buildings, just to wait and hope and remember the past, and there, not expecting anything, in the breezy June morning, he saw him.

Steve had looked up from under the peak of his cap for no particular reason- just taking one of his periodic scans of the people strolling past, just in case one of them was him. But- that guy over there, on the other side of the street, in the dark denim jacket- could it be? Steve straightened up and craned his neck to see over the heads of the other people and the traffic streaming in both directions. His heart was pounding and the pit of his stomach seemed to have plummeted down somewhere a few meters below the sidewalk. The man in the denim jacket was paying for a newspaper from a street vendor, pausing to exchange a few words, like he was a regular customer- so he must be local? Steve thought so, the guy seemed casual and familiar with where he was, like he was home. The man finished up his chat and took his paper and walked off, round the corner- the corner of the street where Bucky Barnes had lived his entire life, from birth ‘til conscription. Steve couldn’t stop his excitement and hope from reaching boiling point as he scurried across the street, dodging traffic, so he could follow the retreating back of the man he hoped against hope was Bucky.

Steve knew where he was going, if he was correct and this man was Bucky and was going home to where he’d always lived, he knew this street like the back of his hand, and so he could cross over again and increase his pace and overtake his target, could slip into an alley where he had a clear view of the set of stairs that would lead Bucky up to his front door, if this man was he. Steve crouched low next to a trashcan and watched with bated breath.

The man walked at an easy pace up the street, in no hurry, nodding to a couple of the people he walked past, even though this seemed to be a black neighborhood these days and there was the sad reality of race relations in New York in the ‘80s. He was in a black denim jacket and black jeans and a dark gray tshirt, and he wore serious boots and a pair of sunglasses. The clothes suited him well and he looked stylish, although they were all evidently old and well-lived in and not chosen to be fashionable. His hair was light brown and tied loosely in back with an elastic, leaving lots of it to fall messily around his face, where it was liberally streaked with gray. His jaw had a patina of lightly grizzled stubble, and his face seemed only slightly creased with any wrinkles; he looked like he was in his early forties at most. The left arm of the jacket hung limply, as if he was only wearing it slung across his shoulders- but the right sleeve had an arm inside it for sure, and his broad shoulders filled the back of it. It was when he saw that that Steve knew. It was him.

Steve exhaled sharply and his hands clutched at the rim of the trashcan involuntarily. Fleetingly, and ridiculously, he regretted he didn’t have his shield, though why on earth he would have it with him here or what he would have done with it, he didn’t know. He guessed it was just a comfort thing, a reassurance thing. Because right now he felt like he was falling, and he would’ve liked to have something familiar to hold on to.

The man who _was_ Bucky mounted the stairs jauntily, folding off the sunglasses into his breast pocket, tucking the newspaper between his elbow and his side, reached the landing, fished in his pocket for his keys, and put them in the lock. Before he let himself in he turned and looked out over the street, as if he was aware of being watched. Steve shrank lower behind his trashcan, and he trembled as he got a clear view of Bucky’s face for the first time in 40 years. There he was. Only barely perceptibly changed. The clear blue eyes beneath the strong brows, puckered ever so slightly in a frown, with the soft hair falling across the broad forehead. His delicate, arrow-shaped nose and the full peaked lips beneath. His incredible cheekbones looked even better with that silver-tipped stubble beneath them. Yes, that was the face Steve had fallen in love with, all those years ago, and had loved ever since. And he was here, and he was alive. Steve’s heart was soaring in his chest as he watched Bucky turn back to the door and go in and shut it behind him, and he stayed crouched in place for several moments, just grinning. He whistled a little tune as he made his way dreamily back down the street, not really knowing where he was heading; it didn’t matter. Bucky was alive and Steve knew where he could find him. And Steve was happy, and he wasn’t in a rush; he didn’t have to force this, thought he could take his time to bring them back together again. They’d already waited forty years, and they could wait a little longer so that Steve could do this right. He felt like they had all the time in the world.

 

*

Over the next few weeks, Steve built up a picture of Bucky’s life in 1982. Essentially, he spied on him. He’d discovered a very handy little bodega with a small coffee counter in front just a few paces up the street from the alleyway he’d first lurked in, with a great view of the foot of Bucky’s stairs, and he made it the center of his campaign. The very next day he was in there early, sitting at the counter facing the street with a paper cup of horrid coffee and a newspaper, and a little notebook. He had waited a very long time and garnered some looks from the guy running the store, which he’d allayed by periodically buying more coffee and some baklava. Several cups later, by the time Bucky finally emerged from his apartment- well past midday- he was feeling pretty wired, and after that day he realized that Bucky’s lifestyle was not suited to rising early, because Bucky was essentially nocturnal and didn’t do much of anything interesting during the daylight hours. Of course pretty much everything Bucky did was interesting to Steve, and he happily trailed him to the grocery store, to the post office where he paid his bills, on his regular walks around the neighborhood. He saw that Bucky was known and liked by the other locals, but he didn’t seem to have anything that could be described as friends among them. And these mundane activities were not the heart of Bucky’s life. No, to find what that was Steve had to follow him out into the seedy mysteries of the New York nights.

He couldn’t deny that what he found there shocked and hurt him. Bucky was what in the ‘30s would have been called a degenerate. He lived in the darkness of alleyways and dodgy bars, and met with the kinds of people Steve would’ve chosen to stay out of the way of. And almost every single night he picked up men and fucked them, either right there out in the alleys, or in the back of parked cars, or in public restrooms, or in one of the parks, or down at the docks, or back at his place. The first time Steve saw this happening he wasn’t quite aware of what was going on. It was the first night, and he’d been following Bucky all day long and hadn’t eaten anything other than that baklava and with all the coffee as well he was feeling lightheaded and a little hysterical, overwhelmed by the concreteness of Bucky’s life unwinding here in New York, right under Steve’s nose. So, because it was late and he was tired and red-eyed, and because he was a little frightened of what he would have seen in there, he hadn’t followed Bucky when he slipped into the little bar in the Village around midnight. Instead he’d lurked around the parked cars, keeping a low profile, waiting for Bucky to come back out again.

Which he soon did, after only about a half hour. He wasn’t alone. In the orange streetlight glare Steve saw Bucky stroll nonchalantly out of the bar and down the street by the side of a tall lanky man who seemed kinda nervous, kept stealing glances at Bucky. Steve followed them, trying his best to not make any noise- it was harder to keep inconspicuous now it was late and there weren’t many people around, and it would have been a complete disaster if Bucky had noticed him following him. There didn’t seem to be any risk of that, though, because Bucky was walking with purpose and the man with him kept pace. They turned a corner and Steve watched them slip into the darkness of an alleyway. He crept closer, sticking close to the brick wall, his heart thumping wildly in subconscious anticipation of something, though his conscious mind was still innocently wondering what was going on. He soon found out.

A murmur of voices, the thump of something solid meeting the wall, wet sounds of kissing, and now Steve was blushing furiously; realization was dawning. Then came the rustle of buttons being undone and the pzzt of a zipper coming down, a few moments of silence, then a sharp intake of breath- a gasp- a grunt- Steve had heard enough. He fled.

 

*

 

Please note that at this stage in the epidemic no-one really knew what AIDS was and how it was spread, and Bucky didn’t know he had it. He wasn’t deliberately going around spreading the infection. But, sadly, that’s exactly what he was doing. And the man he fucked the night Steve was watching did contract AIDS and he did die, and by the time Bucky realized he was sick, he must have infected dozens of people, and that would haunt him ‘til the moment of his death.

 

*

After that night Steve had to take some time for himself to figure things out. His initial reaction was to feel hurt and betrayed, but he soon told himself that that was ridiculous. To Bucky, Steve had been dead for decades, and he must have mourned him and moved on long ago. But then, Steve thought, hadn’t he seen the newspapers, the magazines? Didn’t he realize Steve was back from the dead? The truth was that Bucky had seen the news, but he didn’t believe it. The pictures didn’t look like Steve, he thought, and he was fundamentally suspicious of the government and wouldn’t put it past Reagan to fake Captain America’s reappearance. The story had initially given him a jolt, but when nothing seemed to come of it and Captain America remained the fictional character he’d been since the ‘40s, he simply forgot all about it. He’d gotten used to seeing Captain America comics long ago and had separated that figure from the Steve of his memory. He had no reason to think Steve was really alive. But Steve didn’t know that. He thought maybe Bucky thought he’d become a stool pigeon for Reagan, or was simply not interested in him at all. That made him feel sick, though, because that would mean Bucky had forgotten the truth of their love, forgotten that he knew him, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that.

So there was that, and this thing that he’d discovered about Bucky, that he lived to fuck strange men. Steve struggled to cope with it, and though it hurt him bitterly, curiosity got the better of him and he went out again and again, following Bucky around, even going into the bars when he felt daring, and watched him pick up guys. Strange guys, or a few with whom he obviously had a longstanding arrangement, who he took back to his apartment on a fairly regular basis, and who Steve had a strong urge to find and beat up. The spying and the late nights and just the whole thing made Steve feel dreadful, and he spent the days sitting in his apartment gnawing at his fingernails and writing to himself in his notebook, trying to make sense of things. He was becoming obsessive and anxious and he wasn’t taking care of himself. Even worse, he was becoming more and more sloppy in his stalking, and one dreadful night he’d stayed to watch the whole liaison (ordinarily he would just skulk around the general area until Bucky had finished and follow him home) and watched, holding his breath, as Bucky’s hips roughly rutted into a young latino guy and the two men had grunted and gasped their way to climax together. Watching from behind a dumpster Steve had been simultaneously nauseous, heartbroken, and painfully turned on, and when he’d got home later that night he’d masturbated desperately, shamefully, and then sobbed himself to sleep, all alone in his barren apartment.

After that it was obvious a change had to be made. Steve admitted to himself that this was extremely unhealthy, and that he was putting off the moment when he would reveal himself to Bucky, pretending he was getting close to him by spying on him when really all he was doing was prolonging the agony, because he was scared. He was scared he wouldn’t understand this person Bucky was now, and that Bucky wouldn’t even care much that Steve was alive, wouldn’t want to see him. But what were the alternatives? Carry on living a half-life, haunting Bucky and getting his heart broken over and over again? Forget him entirely? Impossible. Steve gave himself a stern talking to, reminded himself he was Captain America. He was brave. That was his job. He could do this. And so he formulated a plan.


	2. Chapter 2

The oppressive heat of New York in late summer had barely eased when the sun went down, and a couple hours later, past midnight, it was still intense enough to raise a sweat between Bucky’s shoulder blades under his tshirt as he strolled down the familiar route to a favorite bar. Lots of folks were spilled outside it on the sidewalk, entwined by the wall, or sitting at the curb with their drinks, talking and joking and smoking in the warm night underneath some strung fairy lights. There was a carnival atmosphere that affected Bucky, lifting his spirits, which were low that day. Over the past few weeks he’d become aware that something was wrong with him, and in his stomach was a constant dreadful fear; it was common knowledge that the disease was firmly entrenched in New York now, and people had started dying. Bucky wasn’t the kind of guy to go looking for information, was more the head-in-the-sand type, and so he only had a rough idea of its symptoms, which meant that he alternated between being sure his sore throat and rash were signs of imminent death, and scoffing at himself for being such a hypochondriac. At base and in truth he was deadly scared, though. So he was glad that the nightmare of fear that hung over the head of every gay man in America seemed to have lifted for this warm night. Tonight he was going to enjoy himself.

He stepped into the bar, hit immediately with loud striving of electric guitar on the record player and a louder buzz of talk. The room was dark and low and steamy and filled with cigarette smoke. Bucky squeezed himself into a free spot at the bar and ordered a beer, cracking a few deadpan jokes with the barman. He leaned himself back and scanned the room, propped on his elbow and taking a grateful sip of his beer. Lord, it was hot in there. His eyes wandered aimlessly, just enjoying the atmosphere, and then they settled on a guy standing at the end of the bar by the window. Not a regular. Bucky thought he’d never seen him before. Lit from behind by the fairylights strung outside, the guy’s face was shadowed even further by a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, so Bucky studied his body instead. He was one of the finest-looking men he thought he’d ever seen: massive across the shoulders, with perfect biceps and a sculpted chest, but dipping- Bucky got up and walked round to check- to a ludicrously small waist and a tight ass and thighs. A big guy, but perfectly proportioned and balanced. He was wearing a plain white tshirt that showed him off to perfection and looked just deliciously all-American combined with the blonde hair that Bucky could see tufting out from under the baseball cap. Bucky had an appreciation for the male form in all its manifestations, but a serious hunk like this was guaranteed to make him purr. A guy like this would always remind him of someone he used to know.

The hunk, who of course was Steve, was trying extremely hard to keep it cool. Bucky had spotted him, was coming over, Steve hadn’t even needed to get up the courage to approach him and start talking to him- it was all going to plan and then some, and he was a bundle of nerves. Bucky looked so good.

 

Bucky came up to the man in the white tshirt and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, new face. Buy you a drink?”

Steve nodded, not looking up, not daring to look Bucky in the face yet, but then he changed his mind. If Bucky brought him a drink then they’d have to talk here in the bar and that wasn’t what Steve wanted at all. So he shot out a hand and grabbed Bucky’s wrist, having to reach across his body to do so, because off course he had no wrist at his side nearest Steve.

“Save the drink for another time.” Steve mumbled, and Bucky grinned wickedly _._ He’d been right. Tonight was going to be _fun_.

“Sure thing, sweetheart. Show me where you’re headed.”

Steve felt funny to have Bucky address him like he was just another of his hookups, but he stayed brave and he swung away from the bar, leading Bucky by the wrist, out of the door and through the crowds of revelers outside, down the street and round a few corners and out into the quieter part of the night, where they would be disturbed only by the passing of an occasional cab. The heat rising from the sidewalk and the scents of jasmine and garbage were stifling in the buzzing air. Steve dropped Bucky’s wrist. He stopped, and he turned. He leant back against the wall, and he placed his hands on Bucky’s hips, pulling him close. Bucky followed him without hesitation.

“Whyn’t you take that cap off, huh? You got nothing to hide.”

And Bucky reached up and pulled the hat off Steve’s head.

Steve’s face was bowed, still in shadow. He took a deep breath, and deliberately lifted his eyes to Bucky’s, holding that clear blue gaze. Steve’s pupils were large and dark and searching.

Bucky dropped the hat. He gaped.

“Hi, Buck.” Steve said quietly, not breaking his gaze, though his heart was hammering fit to burst and he could feel tears beginning to bubble in his chest and sting his nose, shaking his jaw. He clenched his teeth, kept himself in check. Bucky was just staring at him, his mouth open and his eyes looking something like horrified. Steve tensed. He had no idea what was going to happen next.

“ _Steve_?” Bucky breathed. “This is crazy- _Steve_? Steve, that- it can’t be you. Holy shit- it _is_ you, isn’t it? What the- tell me what’s happening, Steve…” He raised his hand, inclined to touch Steve to check whether he was real or not, but just clasped it to his own face instead, rubbing his mouth and pinching his nose, clutching himself in disbelief. His eyes were wide.

“Yeah, Bucky. Yeah, it’s me. Didn’t you hear the news? I’m back.”

“Sure I _heard_ it, but I didn’t _believe_ it… And that was months ago- where’ve you been?” Bucky’s heart squeezed painfully. “You hadn’t forgotten me?”

“Oh, Bucky, as if I could,” Steve whispered, and he couldn’t help it, he raised his hand to Bucky’s cheek, feeling the roughness of the stubble and the softness of the skin beneath, stroking his thumb across his cheekbone. Bucky’s eyes closed momentarily and he seemed to sag beneath Steve’s touch.

“Then where’ve you been?” Bucky repeated, in a broken whisper, leaning his face into Steve’s hand.

“I thought you were dead, Bucky. That’s why I- that’s why I decided not to come back. But then I found myself here, and everything was so strange, and you- you’re alive. It took some time to get used to it. And it took me a while to find you.”

“I stayed right where you could’ve found me, Steve. Why’d you think I still live there after all this time? I was always waiting for you, but I didn’t think you would actually-” The words left Bucky in a rush, truths that he hadn’t even really admitted to himself before. All the years of grief and loneliness, that only fucking could cover over, and here was Steve, looking no older than the day they’d gone down that stupid zip wire onto the train- it was impossible. He pulled back and took a good long look at Steve. It was truly him. The only man he’d ever loved purely. Here, finally and truly. Impossibly.

“I’m sorry, Buck… But I’m here now. Happy to see me?” Steve asked with a nervous little smile.

“Yeah, Steve. Of course I am, yeah.” Bucky smiled back, but there was a sadness there in his eyes. “Listen, we can’t talk properly here. Come back with me.”

“’Course.” Steve nodded and followed Bucky as he led the way back towards Brooklyn. His heart was twisting and his stomach churning, and everything felt more than a little unreal. He was aching to touch and hold Bucky, to kiss him, but Bucky seemed to be holding himself back, and Steve felt a little hurt and a little puzzled. They travelled in silence, swiftly, wanting to reach the apartment as soon as possible, and occasionally Bucky stole swift glances at Steve, filled with wonder and a happy kind of disbelief.

 

*

 

They jogged up the stairs when they reached the building and Bucky hastily let them into the stuffy apartment, shutting the door behind Steve. They stood in the darkness. Neither wanted to put the light on, because the room was heavy with an atmosphere of mystery and tension that would have been shattered by the harsh overhead lights. They could make each other out fine in the dim light sliding through the slats of Bucky’s blinds. Steve was looking around, at this room that was so strange and yet so familiar to him. Less furniture than before, but the space was the same- the open sitting area with a couch and a dining table and full-length windows with a minuscule balcony beyond, and the hatch through into the kitchen. The open archway that led to the corridor that led to the bathroom, the bedrooms. Steve wondered what it must have been like for Bucky, living here alone all this time, whether the memories of the time before still swarmed at him as thickly as they were Steve, here for the first time in forty years. Bucky watched him watching, saying nothing.

Steve turned to Bucky in the heavy silence and approached him. His eyes searched his face, which, like the room he found himself in, he knew by heart, but found indescribably different from the last time he had seen it. Steve felt they were outside time. It didn’t matter that it was 1982, it could have been 1942 or any time in the whole century, because he and Bucky were alone together, like they were meant to be. He stepped closer, until he was right in front of the more aged man, and his eyes never left his face. Bucky was still and poised, waiting. The tension was growing unbearable. They were so close now and Bucky was gazing steadily into Steve’s eyes, and Steve tried his best to meet the eye contact, but he was helplessly drawn to Bucky’s lips, and he unconsciously licked his own as he stared at them, longing to kiss them. Neither of them had spoken a word since they were out in the street.

With a sigh, Steve finally broke the tension. He touched Bucky’s face and pressed his lips to Bucky’s broad mouth, and his other hand tugged at his hips, drawing him closer. His eyes closed and he kissed Bucky sweetly, slowly, dragging his fingers through that long hair, so different from his memories. The kiss wasn’t so different though- Bucky felt just like how he remembered. He smelled the same. Steve whispered something unintelligible, meaningless, against his lips and Bucky sighed softly in reply. Bucky’s hand was raised as if in protest, caught off guard by Steve’s kiss, but then he brushed Steve’s chest beneath the thick cotton of his tshirt, just lightly, as he kissed him back, and Steve lifted his own hand to it so he could press Bucky’s fingers against himself, wanting to feel them close to his heart and under his hand.

He broke the kiss with a sticky gasp and a hoarse murmur, close to Bucky’s lips:

“God, Bucky, I’ve missed you so much-”

“I know, I’ve missed you too, I can’t believe this is real-”

“Kiss me.”

Bucky did, softly and carefully, his body still poised and a little tense, but Steve pressed harder against him and opened his mouth and moved his tongue against Bucky’s lips, his teeth, his tongue, and Bucky could feel his need like an electric current. Steve tangled one hand in the hair at the back of Bucky’s head and slid the other round his waist, pushing their bodies up against each other close as close.

Bucky absorbed Steve’s electricity, but he felt leaden himself. This was all happening so suddenly. Steve was so tall and so broad up against him, and in Bucky’s memories he wasn’t always this way; just as often he came back to him soft and skinny and slight, and this felt like just one of a number of dreams that could’ve come true. It felt like one of the countless times he’d hooked up with a big tall strong guy and pretended he was Steve, but this time it was real. Bucky told himself that. _This is real_. Steve was kissing him deeply, passionately, and he was starting to tug Bucky across the vinyl floor, towards the bedroom- of course Steve knew exactly where he was going. But Bucky stopped against that irresistible tug and drew regretfully back from Steve’s lips, flattening his hand on his chest in restraint.

“Steve, wait-”

“Please, Bucky, c’mon- I need you- we’ve waited so long-” Steve ducked his head and went to kiss him again, running a hand up Bucky’s neck. He knew Bucky loved having his neck touched, kissed, bitten. He was dying to put his mouth on him.

Bucky laughed uncomfortably and placed his hand on Steve’s wrist, stopping him, pulling away more firmly this time. He wanted this as much as Steve did, but it couldn’t be as simple as just wanting it, not now.

“No, I’m serious. We’ve got stuff to talk about.”

Steve frowned at him, needy and wounded.

“So you’ll fuck countless random dudes, but you don’t want me?”

Bucky’s head jerked in surprise. That he wasn’t expecting. He dropped Steve’s wrist, frowned at him questioningly.

“Wait, what? How do you know about that?”

Steve looked unhappy and guilty, blushing.

“I’ve been following you. For weeks. I had to know what your life was like these days. I’ve seen what you do. That’s how I knew you’d be at that bar tonight.” He gazed at his feet, ashamed of himself, unable to meet Bucky’s eye, his blush growing hotter.

Bucky was silent for a few pauses, and his head dropped, hiding his face behind his hair, and Steve was worried that he was furious, but Bucky mainly just felt sad for Steve. For how he must have felt, witnessing Bucky’s sorry sordid excuse for a life. For how this was playing out, so differently from how Steve was obviously expecting. The sadness and the leadenness in Bucky’s chest felt so heavy. He hated having to do this to him.

“I don’t know exactly what you saw, Steve-”

“Enough. I’ve seen enough.”

“- Ok. Ok. I wish I had a good explanation, but I don’t. It is what it is, and I know it’s ugly. I don’t know if I can ask you to understand, but I hope you can. I lost you, I lost my arm, I lost everything. I had nothing, except-”

“Except fucking strangers.”

“Well… well, yeah. I guess. And Steve-”

“So if fucking is so important to you, why won’t you fuck me?” Steve interrupted. “C’mon Bucky, I’m here, it’s me, I’m here now, and I need you so bad, I’m going crazy for you. I haven’t been touched for forty years, and I don’t want nobody but you. Feel that. I’m yours, Bucky.” Steve had come up close to Bucky again, kissed his neck, whispered his last words into his ear, and he took Bucky’s hand and guided it to his hip, his stomach, lower, to where his cock was heavy and half-hard behind his fly. Bucky pulled his fingers away from Steve’s grip and Steve shot him a look full of betrayal and pain.

“Steve, Steve, please don’t do that, don’t. You think I don’t want you? Look!” He raised his hand, which was shaking, and his eyes sought Steve’s, their look dark and intense, and his breath was coming quick. “I want you, ok? I’m dying for you, I can’t believe you’re really here, it’s like a dream. But I can’t. Listen, this is what I gotta talk to you about. You seen me fuck all those guys right?”

“Well I didn’t _watch_ , but-”

“Ok,” Bucky hurriedly continued, thinking they didn’t need to get into details, “Well you don’t know what’s happening, here in New York, everywhere. Guys are dying, Steve. Guys are dying everywhere, and it’s all gay guys, and they think it’s a disease that’s passed on through sex. And, oh god, Steve, I think I’ve got it, I’m so scared-” Bucky suddenly collapsed under the grief and sadness in his chest, pressing his hand to his eyes, and he turned away and groped towards the couch, sank heavily onto it. He dropped his hand and looked up at Steve, his eyes haunted and hollow and frightened. “I thought I didn’t care if I died or not, but now- now there’s _you-_ ” he choked and couldn’t continue. He was close to tears.

Steve stood, very still, for a moment. The he went over to the door and flicked the light switch next to it and the harsh light blinked on, turning the atmosphere fraught and flattened, all sexual energy gone. Steve could tell Bucky was genuinely frightened, and it paused his single-minded desire. He went over and sunk next to him on the couch.

“What are you talking about? What’s going on?” He placed a hand on Bucky’s thigh, eyes searching his face. Bucky met his gaze with a bleak look, unshed tears glazing his eyes. He took a steadying breath.

“There’s this new disease. They don’t know what it is or where it comes from, but it’s spreading real bad, it started off in California, and now it’s here. And it’s killing so many people, Steve. So many guys I know- young, healthy guys- they’ve just up and died. Within a year, some of them. And people don’t know what causes it, but they’re starting to think it must be passed on through sex, somehow, maybe in cum, they’re not sure. But I think they’re right. And I think I’ve got it. And there’s no cure, Steve. There’s no cure.”

Bucky’s eyes bored into Steve’s, trying to communicate the gravity of the situation, his fear. The fact that he just _couldn’t do this_ , however much they both wanted to.

“So that’s why you don’t want to fuck me? You think you got this disease, and you don’t want to give it to me?”

“Yeah. That’s why.”

“You were _going_ to fuck me. Back in that bar, when you didn’t know it was me. You would’ve fucked me if I was a stranger. What about him? Wouldn’t he have mattered?”

Bucky looked uncomfortable. “Of course he would Steve, and I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have fucked him. Not properly. Maybe last week… But I wasn’t sure then. I’m pretty sure now.” Bucky had only come to this conclusion since Steve revealed himself to him, but it felt too awful to admit that out loud. He _would_ have fucked him if he had been a stranger, because before Steve, before this evening, he hadn’t given a fuck about anything. And he now realized that would have been a dreadful thing to do. He was so absorbed in his own misery and anhedonia that he would’ve not even have thought of the damage that he was capable of wreaking. He didn’t want Steve to think he could have been that lowly, that careless with another human being’s life, and he avoided his gaze. Steve’s thoughts didn’t seem to be travelling in that direction, however.

“So you wouldn’t have fucked him “properly”? Whatever that means, we can do that. Do it to me, Bucky.” He leaned closer to Bucky, squeezing his thigh, trying to compel him with his eyes. Being next to him, touching his leg, was driving him crazy again, raising his pulse, channeling all his thoughts into his desire. Bucky looked troubled and angry. He wasn’t getting through to Steve at all.

“Aren’t you listening, Steve? This disease _kills_ people. It’s going to kill _me_.”

“You don’t know that. You said no-one knows what it is.” Steve was stubborn, couldn’t accept that what Bucky was saying could be true, that he could die. Not when he’d only just found him alive. He had planned this, and they had waited so damn long. They _needed_ each other, needed to feel each other again, needed to claim each other and come back together. He wasn’t going to give up.

“I know people are dying. And I know I’m not going to risk your life as well as mine.” As far as Bucky concerned, that was final.

Steve realized he wasn’t going to get through to him by arguing; Bucky had always been a stubborn son of a bitch, and Steve- well, Steve was famous for never backing down. They could sit there all night arguing if they set to it.

But Steve had other tactics.

He cast a combative look at Bucky, then got up off the couch. He switched the light back off, plunging the room again into comforting streetlight dusk, then turned back to Bucky, found his eyes, and stepped towards him. Standing before the couch in front of his long-lost lover, Steve slowly and deliberately stripped out of his tshirt, raising his arms to show off the broadness of his chest, the taughtness of his stomach and waist. He tossed the shirt to one side. His hair was tousled, and his cheeks were flushed. His heart was pounding. His eyes never left Bucky’s.

“Jesus christ Steve, _don’t-_ ” Bucky groaned. Steve obviously didn’t get it, didn’t realize just how hard Bucky was fighting to hold himself back. Everything in him was straining towards Steve, only held in check by his fear, and if Steve had understood that he wouldn’t be tempting him so terribly. Bucky’s throat felt thick as he looked at Steve, taking in not just his beautiful body but the look on his face, which was powerful in its vulnerability. Bucky knew Steve, knew that this kind of behavior didn’t come naturally to him, that he was pushing himself hard in his attempt to seduce Bucky, and Bucky felt awful that he had to deny him, turn him down. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt Steve, but he was going to have to.

Steve said nothing. He just swallowed and with shaking hands unbuckled his belt. Unbuttoned his flies. Shimmied down and stepped out of his pants. There he stood, in front of Bucky in only his tight briefs, the outline of his erection clearly showing behind the fabric, displaying himself, so open and vulnerable and needy, begging Bucky with his every motion. He felt wild and out of control, breath coming quickly, and he was so scared that Bucky was going to turn away, hand him back his shirt and tell him to knock it off, but Bucky’s eyes had gone hooded as they involuntarily travelled over his body, and that made Steve feel so fucking _hot-_

He dropped to his knees in front of Bucky and spread them, eyes dark and pleading, lips soft. He carefully took Bucky’s hand in his own and placed it on his chest, spreading Bucky’s reluctant fingers against his heated skin.

Bucky held his hand stiff at first, but as Steve began to move it around, forcing him to feel his firm muscle, the slight slick of sweat from the overwarm apartment on his smooth skin, his nipple- first soft, then hardening- he couldn’t help but respond, beginning to stroke and caress, exploring this body, so long-remembered and so longed for.

Feeling Bucky start to respond and touch him Steve let out a helpless moan and raised himself on his knees, draping his arms over Bucky’s shoulders, offering his chest to further encourage Bucky’s touch. He pressed his face to Bucky’s neck and sighed and moaned against it as Bucky ran his hand up and down his side, slow and hesitant, but even like that just so much better than Steve had ever even remembered.

“I can’t do this Steve,” Bucky whispered, feeling like he was going to faint. Steve was just so much, draped over him like this, offering himself, so brazenly hungry. He didn’t stop though. He couldn’t stop. Steve’s body felt so good and right under his hand. He’d wanted this for so long; he’d searched for it in the bodies of so many men, but nothing could compare to the real thing, to his love, to Steve.

“Don’t stop- It’s ok, just please don’t stop-” Steve gasped senselessly. He was so desperate and was beginning to roll his hips already, undulating under Bucky’s hand, his cock so hard and strained against his briefs. “Ah, Buck, you feel so good- _uhh_ -”

Bucky gave a cracked cry and he couldn’t resist any longer, he turned his head and found Steve’s damp parted lips and kissed him, trembling as their tongues slid against each other and Steve moaned into his mouth. He moved his hand with more purpose, over the ripple of Steve’s abs and lower, to where his skin went flat and smooth all the way down past the waistband of his underwear. At this Steve rose up even higher, burying his hands in Bucky’s hair and pressing his body up between his thighs, keening a moan, needing more and more, dying to feel that rough hot hand on his cock-

But Bucky had paused. His hand caressed the taught skin beneath Steve’s belly button but went no further, and then dropped away from Steve’s body altogether. He pulled away from the kiss and dropped his face to Steve’s shoulder, his body heavy with sadness and regret.

“I’m sorry, Steve. I can’t.” He pulled fully away now, and pushed Steve, not ungently, back onto his heels, and sat back on the couch. He attempted a bleak smile. Steve looked like he was going to cry, and his big noble tragic face looked so young, and Bucky felt incredibly old in comparison: old and cracked and broken and dirty and _infected_. Bucky just couldn’t touch Steve, so pure and good, feeling like that, knowing the poison that was within him. It would be wrong.

Steve swallowed hard and dropped his head. He felt entirely bereft, and for a moment he wanted to redouble his efforts, to grind Bucky into the couch and grab his hand and shove it down his briefs, to bite him, to force him. But then he realized what he was thinking and shuddered, appalled. So he did nothing, just sighed and shivered and rubbed his face, and then when doing that made him realize he was close to tears he let them come, and dropped his face into Bucky’s lap and cried a little, and Bucky stroked his hair. It felt nice. Steve didn’t want nice. He wanted rawness, need, urgency. He wanted Bucky to want him, to take and have him. But he guessed this was ok. They were together, and he should be grateful to have that much.

“I’m so glad you found me, Steve.” Bucky murmured, rubbing Steve’s scalp through his tufty light hair. Yes, this felt so nice, and Bucky was liking nice. He hadn’t had nice in far too long. Sex was hideously complicated and it was good to just be close like this instead, calm and careful and steady. They’d only been reunited less than two hours ago. “I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t know I could’ve carried on much longer like I was doing, without you.”

“You’re not really going to die, are you?” Steve asked plaintively, his voice muffled in Bucky’s jeans

“Shh, Steve, don’t worry, ok? Come to bed. Come on. We can talk more tomorrow.” Bucky got off the couch and dragged Steve up with him, holding his shoulder. Steve nodded like a fractious child who finally admits he’s overtired, and let Bucky lead him down the hallway and into Bucky’s bedroom. It was very different from how it was when they’d slept there as boys with Steve on the couch cushions on the floor, or later when, older, they’d squeezed into the single bed together and kissed and rubbed and tried and tried to get enough of each other. Now Bucky’s bed was just a double mattress on the floor with a tangle of sheets atop it and detritus of coffee mugs and tissues and newspapers and ashtrays scattered around it. Steve thought of all the men that Bucky must’ve fucked here, but he pushed that out of his mind, and laid himself down, and felt Bucky- still fully clothed- fit himself against his back without hesitation, like it hadn’t been decades since the last time they’d lain in a bed together, and drape a sheet over the two of them.

Steve sighed and pressed back into him, and Bucky wrapped his single arm around him, his hand on Steve’s bare chest, and nuzzled into his neck, breathing in his still-familiar scent like he could never get enough, and felt more content than he had thought it possible he’d ever be able to feel again.

Steve was not content. Bucky’s hand on his chest was maddeningly still, the light resting touch teasing at his senses, making him yearn for strokes and pinches and _intent_. He gusted a sigh and tried to relax, but his cock was still half-hard and he couldn’t help wanting so much more than this. After all these years, he couldn’t just lie still with Bucky right there up against him and not _want_.

So the tension was building again. Bucky could feel it trembling in Steve’s body- under his hand his heartbeat was fast and hard and uneven, and it was impossible to ignore it and fall asleep. He didn’t know what to do. He’d never been in this kind of situation before, one where he’d had to deny himself and his lover what they were both craving. He considered the idea of going ahead and letting himself and using a condom, but he was too scared and sad and sick to risk even that- what if it broke?- and he was inwardly wrestling with himself when Steve rolled over within his arm. Their faces were right up close, and Bucky could feel his sweet breath on his cheek.

They lay still like that for a long moment, captivated by the closeness, their eyes saying all kinds of complicated things that words would not have managed; love, and relief, regret, and fear, and desire.

Steve broke eye contact first, because he was finding it too hard to maintain it, when his heart was jumping in his throat and his cock was aching heedlessly, and his stomach felt like a gnawing pit of longing. He guessed he knew why Bucky couldn’t do this, but he was simmering with resentment all the same- it felt like Bucky had chosen a lifetime of fucking and risky behavior and danger and sickness, and the price was that now they couldn’t have the only thing that would have been right and true and good and pure. They couldn’t have each other. So he broke eye contact and tried to relax and just feel their closeness, like this, and feel it was enough. He shut his eyes and shifted closer to Bucky, slipping his hands up under his tshirt so he could feel his back, but that just made him tremble more, because it felt so warm and strong and good under his hands, and it made him want even more badly.

“Steve, baby? You ok?” Bucky had been sure that Steve was going to say something, and now he could sense woundedness and disappointment in his silence. Steve nodded, enjoying a shudder of love at hearing Bucky call him baby, and pressed his face into Bucky’s shoulder.

“I’m ok, Buck. Let’s just go to sleep, like you said.”

“Sure? We can talk if you want?”

“Don’t want to talk.” Steve paused, debating whether what he wanted to say next was a good idea. He couldn’t really resist though, not with his hands on Bucky’s back, so: “Could you take this off?” He meant Bucky’s tshirt, and Bucky understood.

“Yeah, babe.” Bucky didn’t think it was a good idea either, but the thought of being skin to skin against Steve was just as irresistible to him. So Bucky pulled away and sat up and stripped off the thin shirt in one fluid motion, and then he lay down next to Steve again, and Steve slipped back under his arm and pressed himself against him and ran his hands up his back, and their chests were touching, and lying close together like that just felt entirely different without the thin layer of cotton as a barrier between their skin. It was electric. Bucky’s eyes shut and he exhaled heavily, and his hand found the back of Steve’s head, grasping his nape, and he cursed inwardly at this horrible mistake, because now he didn’t feel sad and heavy at all, he felt soft all over, except for his cock. His cock was very much not soft, all of a sudden, and it was _throbbing,_ and that was really what Bucky didn’t want to be- _couldn’t let himself be-_ feeling.

With Bucky’s silky skin everywhere against his own Steve could barely hold it together any more, and then he heard Bucky exhale in his ear, a shaky noise filled with lust, and that made him gasp in reply, and he let go. He pressed himself even closer to his chest, and his fingers dug into his back, and he found he was easing his leg in between Bucky’s, entwining them even closer, and their hips were hard against each other now and Steve could feel Bucky’s cock rigid beneath his jeans, and that made him frantic, and he pushed even harder with his hips so he could grind his own erection against it, and the friction of the clothed touch flared like a forest fire across all of his nerves.

“Is this ok?” Steve gasped, because he had a horror now of going too far, of forcing Bucky, but Bucky was rolling his hips in return and clamping his legs round Steve’s, and he wasn’t hesitating like he had before, and his hand slid down to Steve’s chest and his side and he was stroking him all firm and hot and sweet, and he groaned throatily in reply,

“It’s more than ok, baby- God, I just can’t resist you, you’re too good-”

“You’re so good- Buck- I‘m so hard-”

“Yeah, fuck, you want it so much, don’t you?”

Steve panted and practically yelped, “Yes-”, and then when Bucky’s fingers rolled his nipple, he cried sharply “I want more- please-”, and his hand went to Bucky’s waistband, to his fly, to take off those restrictive jeans, but that was wrong, because it made Bucky stop touching him, made him pull away and put a hand on his wrist.

“No, sorry babe, those’re staying on. Let me see you, though-” Bucky growled, and pulled down Steve’s underwear and looked down at him with an expression that made Steve whimper, down at his red and sticky and rock-hard cock, squeezed between their two bodies. Bucky had lost it, lost all his caution and all his carefulness, and he had wanted nothing so badly in his entire life as he wanted now to wrap his hand round that cock, press his lips to it, swallow it, feel its heat and its firmness and make Steve buck with pleasure, but he hadn’t gone so far out of his mind that couldn’t stop himself. So he stopped himself, because he had to. But he could look at him, and marvel at how beautiful and delicious Steve looked like that, how hot and needy, and Bucky hadn’t had anything like this in years, had had no reason to linger and cherish and watch, had only wanted to grind and thrust and come as fast as possible for so long, and his heart was overflowing with the difference, and his cock was stupidly hard from it.

He suddenly had an idea, and he grinned wickedly, and Steve, seeing that, went still in anticipation. And then he practically choked when Bucky tightened his grasp on his wrist, and moved it, and made Steve put his hand on his own cock, exposed and jutting between them, and Steve instinctively wrapped his fingers around himself. He was struggling to breathe because this was just so hot and so teasing, and Bucky was holding his gaze and nodding and encouraging him, so he began to stroke himself, with Bucky’s hand lightly guiding him. Steve’s head rolled on his neck, and his eyelids fluttered, and his lips parted, and he let out the most sensual moan that Bucky had ever heard. The moan went right through him, straight to his stomach and thighs and his cock and his balls, and he tightened his grip on Steve’s hand and helped him move it a little faster and a little firmer, and that wrung more moans and a whimper- “ _Bucky_!”- from Steve’s throat, and Bucky felt himself coming further undone with every stroke and sound, with all of it.

In that moment, with the pleasure of his hand on his cock and Bucky gazing at him burning in every inch of his body, Steve regretted that Bucky only had one hand, because it would have felt so good to have him touch his body while he helped Steve jerk himself off. But then Bucky moved them both so Steve rolled onto his back, and began kissing his neck and his chest, glancing down to watch the sight of Steve’s hand working his own cock, and Steve just _dissolved._

He spread his legs, and his moans escalated into breathless cries, and Bucky groaned and started to seriously grind against his thigh, and Steve stroked his cock faster and harder, and Bucky was watching him with eyes dark and hot and smoldering, and was whispering into his chest words of love and encouragement, in a tangled rush that Steve couldn’t make out, because his brain wasn’t functioning, because everything felt so transcendentally good, because he was going to _come_ -

And he cried out passionately as he did, hard, and his cum spilled over Bucky’s hand and over his own hand and onto his bare stomach, and Bucky was cursing and grinding him into the mattress and Steve felt him shudder and heard him groan deep and long as he came himself, in his jeans, and then they were clutching each other and panting and rutting their way through the aftershocks, and their found each other’s lips and they could do nothing but drink each other in and kiss and kiss until their trembling subsided and they could go easy and warm and drowsy against each other. And then, sticky and with some of their need finally sated, they could sink down into each other, and sleep.

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

In the morning, Steve woke first. He was a man of habits, and it was not his habit to sleep in, though admittedly the recent string of late nights spent out stalking Bucky had driven him to keep slightly more slugabed hours. On this morning he blinked awake at the sound of a garbage truck on the street outside Bucky’s window, and when he sat up he could see an overcast dim dawn sky over the rooftops. The room was still and suffused with gentle grey light, and Steve felt calm and complete within it, like the whole scene had been organised and drawn and composed by an artist well skilled in harmony and balance. The mattress was in the center of the room, and the window shed its light fully on it from the opposing wall, causing gorgeous complex shadows in the peaks and valleys of the rumpled sheets. Steve was on the side of the mattress furthest from the door, and Bucky was on his right. _Bucky was on his right._ What a thing for him to be. Bucky was lying asleep on his back on Steve’s right, a hand’s span away. Bucky was so close that their legs were entwined. Bucky wasn’t a figure retreating up a dark alley with a strange man, oblivious of Steve slinking in the shadows behind him. Bucky wasn’t just that bit too far out of Steve’s reach for Steve to save him despite his desperate straining fingers, Bucky wasn’t falling away from him. Bucky wasn’t in uniform, didn’t have a gun or a grenade, wasn’t a schoolboy or a discontented shipping clerk, wasn’t a soldier, wasn’t a howling commando, wasn’t a dead man. Bucky was lying safely asleep next to Steve. Bucky was on Steve’s right. That’s what he was and all he was, in this precious moment, in the dawn light.

Steve looked at him, so close beside him, sprawled on his back with his chest bare and his jeans still on. In the darkness of the night, in the timelessness of tension and kissing and touching, or when he’d followed him from a distance in the dim of the streetlamps, Steve hadn’t really noticed that Bucky looked much different from the last time he’d seen him, back in ‘44. He felt the same, he smelled the same, and Steve loved him just exactly the same as he had on the day he fell. But in the morning light, Steve saw that he was changed. There was the grey in his jaw-length hair and his stubble, and Steve could see now that the silver was scattered in Bucky’s sparse dark body hair, too. And there were more subtle signs of aging also, which Steve wouldn’t have been able to describe, but which he noticed: a roughening and loosening of the skin of his neck, a certain thickness to the torso that a younger man would never have; Bucky was still lean and in no way running to fat, but his muscle looked less defined and sculpted- as it had been when he was twenty- than bulky and dense, and his stomach, with its erotic trail of dark hair, was broad across as his chest, with no definition in the waist. Steve felt like he could study him forever, noting everything that was familiar and everything that was strange, and cherishing all of it.

As well as the signs of age, there was a more striking difference; Steve’s eyes were drawn irresistibly to the wreckage where Bucky’s left arm used to be. The shoulder on that side was obviously not as strong as the right, and below the ball and socket it tapered and folded down to a gnarled stump that extended only a few inches down the side of his chest, puckered and lumpy with scar tissue. The skin of his left pec was streaked with scars too, and seemed to ripple towards the stump. It was obviously long healed and didn’t look painful, but it didn’t look peaceful either, it looked like what it was- a crippling wound, a dreadful disfigurement. Bucky had survived his fall, but he’d paid a terrible price. Steve thought of himself, preserved perfectly in ice with barely a scratch on him, and felt lucky, and guilty. He’d only had to suffer a few days of grief without his lover before he’d blissfully sunk into oblivion, and then he’d sprung into the 1980s whole and young and healthy, and his love had been there to meet him. But Bucky had had to inch his way through every hour of the second half of the 20th century troubled and maimed and alone. And now, Steve remembered, sick. Worry creased his brow. He loved Bucky so much it hurt him, and he could never offer up enough thankfulness to god, to fate, to whatever force it was that allowed them both to be alive and together now, in this early morning in late summer, and it seemed impossible that Bucky could die.

Steve had no idea about the AIDS crisis, had never even heard of it. He hadn’t really talked to anyone at all, he realized suddenly, not an actual conversation, in the months since his resurrection, and he didn’t really watch the news because it depressed him, and so pretty much anything could’ve happened, current-affairs-wise, and he wouldn’t know. First he’d been in shock and preoccupied with dodging Ronald Reagan’s grasping claws, and then he’d been obsessed with finding and then following Bucky, but the whole time he’d been essentially isolated from other people and the outside world. So he had no frame of reference for what Bucky had told him last night, no way of knowing if it was as bad as he’d said it was, or whether it had just been Buck being pessimistic and dramatic like he could be. Bucky didn’t _look_ sick, Steve thought. Sure, his face was a little drawn and it looked like his muscle could be slightly wasting, not in its prime, but Bucky didn’t exactly look after himself very well, and he was, after all, sixty years old beneath the preternatural youthfulness the serum had given him. He was bound to look a little ropy.

“You’re not going to die, Buck.” Steve whispered, just to reassure himself, because Bucky was asleep and couldn’t hear him. “You’re just not.” He stroked a stray strand of hair away from Bucky’s eyes, making Bucky murmur something and move his legs instinctively closer to Steve in his sleep, and because of the feeling of that, and because it was dawn in late summer and therefore probably not much more than 5am, Steve carefully laid back down next to him and placed an arm across his chest, but he didn’t sleep, because he was too happy. He just lay in the soft light and felt the rise and fall of Bucky’s chest, and looked at him, and loved him, and was content.

He must have fallen back asleep at some point though, because he woke again what must have been a few hours later. The sun had burned off the misty clouds of dawn and a creamy gold rectangle of it was beaming onto the wall above the mattress. Steve lay in the feeling of warmth and closeness for a while, his mind soaring ahead over this day that he and Bucky were going to spend together. It was going to be a scorcher, he could tell; they could go out to the park, just walk around and look at things and remember times they’d had, or sit outside a café and talk about the last decades- there was still so much of Bucky’s life that Steve had no idea about, so much he wanted to ask him. The anticipation of a happy day buzzed in his chest, and he studied Bucky some more, waiting for him to wake up.

Twenty minutes later it became apparent that Bucky was still deeply asleep and not planning on coming round any time soon, out cold on his back with his mouth open and a slight snore vibrating his out-breaths. Steve was beginning to feel sweaty and gross from lying in bed too long, and he needed to pee, so he extracted himself from the tangle of sheets and legs and padded over the corridor into the bathroom. He wrinkled his nose at the state of it; it was evident that Bucky was not one for housework, hadn’t kept to military discipline and tidiness like Steve had- the sink was encrusted with blobs of toothpaste and the calcified trickle of a leaking tap, and the toilet was unspeakable. When he and Steve lived together, Steve would shape him up, that’s for sure. Steve didn’t really realize that he was thinking of moving in with Bucky, was just so instinctively certain of it that it wasn’t even something he had to consciously decide. They’d live here, in the apartment of their youth, and Steve would make it a little nicer, and they would look after each other and share a bed each and every night. Warmed with the certain knowledge of this future, Steve stepped into the kitchen- where the stove clock showed 9:27- drank a glass of water, and looked around for signs of nourishment. The fridge contained an almost-finished six-pack of beer, some dubious yogurt, a lone egg, and half an ancient onion that was infusing the entire fridge with its pungent reek. Steve’s nose wrinkled again.

Ten minutes later he clattered back into the apartment, having tugged on his tshirt and pants from where they lay carelessly on the living room floor and found Bucky’s keys on the couch cushions, with an armful of groceries- his friend Timon in the bodega over the street had greeted him as an old comrade. He laid out orange juice, milk, bread, eggs, bacon, fruit, crackers and cheese on the counter. He put the coffee on. He was whistling as he finished fixing breakfast for the both of them and started to hunt for something he could use as a tray, when he heard Bucky’s shuffling sleepy steps come up to the kitchen doorway.

“Mornin’” Bucky mumbled, leaning against the doorframe and rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand.

“Morning, babe!” Steve beamed. “I got breakfast.” He gestured towards the plates and the steaming cups of coffee, and then he grinned and slid over the floor up to Bucky, placed his hands on his bare waist, and kissed him warmly, inhaling his sleepy-warm scent with joy and feeling his rough stubble grazing his chin.

Bucky kissed him back, his hand going to Steve’s bicep, and even just that little touch combined with the feel of his sturdy waist under his hands made Steve- poor needy swooning Steve- feel like he couldn’t stand up straight. He wound his arms further round Bucky and deepened the kiss, his cheeks growing warm. As he eased his tongue into Bucky’s mouth his heart leapt and his cock twitched, and breakfast probably would have gone forgotten if he had had anything to do with it, but Bucky stiffened and detached himself from Steve’s lips and arms, with a smile that was a little strange, a little sheepish, a little strained.

“Wow- mmf-” here Bucky dodged Steve honing back in to try and kiss him again- “mm, looks great, darlin’, thank you.” He sidestepped around Steve and hastily made it to the safety of the counter and grabbed one of the coffees, slurping it even though it was still scalding, and did another forced smile, even worse than his first attempt. Bucky had woken up feeling overwhelmed and unwell, and he couldn’t quite deal with Steve’s high levels of enthusiasm right now. He wasn’t used to waking up to the scent of coffee brewing and the sounds of someone making him breakfast- his routine was usually a cigarette and regret and the rebuff of whoever he’d woken up beside. In fact when he’d woken up and Steve hadn’t been in the bed he’d had a brief moment where the night before had seemed an hallucination, and a part of him had found the idea of that a relief. But then he’d heard Steve in the kitchen, and of course he was so happy this was real, but he was used to being alone and Steve was just so much, so suddenly. It was just- overwhelming.

Steve slowly pivoted at the doorway, his heart juddering as it crashed down somewhere a whole lot lower than where it had been climbing to since he had woken up; it had been getting higher and higher all the while he had been pottering in domestic bliss around the apartment, dreaming of the future, fixing his man his breakfast and kissing on him. It had been soaring, and he’d been feeling so hopeful and happy and _home_. But now he felt foolish. He didn’t understand- but his lip was _not_ wobbling. He faced Bucky and swallowed hard and licked his lips and smiled, bravely, and said

“How’d you sleep?” because that was a normal thing to ask, whereas all the things he actually wanted to ask- _Are you mad at me? Don’t you want me, want this? Was the breakfast too much? Should I go?-_ were not particularly normal and were pretty pathetic and he had _some_ pride.

“Yeah, like a log.” Bucky dipped his head and smiled a little, shyly, through his hair, a genuine smile this time. He did it on purpose, for Steve; Steve was so transparent, he could tell he’d hurt his feelings. Bucky had never been able to handle hurting him, and he realized he’d have to put aside his morning crankiness and being slightly weirded out by this turn of events, and make it ok for Steve. This was tricky for both of them. “Was disappointed not to wake up with you beside me, though.”

This and the shy smile did what Bucky intended and made Steve’s fears evaporate, and he melted inside and his stomach did a little backflip, and he smiled back and went over and picked up his own coffee, and, while he was inclined to, he didn’t do anything embarrassing like break down sobbing or try and make out with Bucky again, he just smirked and said, loftily,

“Maybe if you weren’t such a lazy ass and woke up at a reasonable hour, you would’ve done…”

Bucky did an exaggerated double take at the kitchen clock.

“Nine fifty-two!? You think this is _late_ , Rogers? Only time I ever see this side of midday I’m up all night and coming at it from the other direction.”

Steve laughed, and squirmed happily inside at being called “Rogers”, because that felt just like the good old days.

That tricky little moment had passed, but it made them both aware of the need for an equilibrium; Steve would reign himself in some, and Bucky would let his walls down a little in turn. It would be a balancing act, but it would be ok. They both wanted nothing more than to try.

This mutual realization, and their laughter and banter and the glint of affection in Bucky’s eyes cleared the atmosphere, and so they could take the plates and go and sit at the coffee table and eat without tension.  The breakfast was good and the coffee hot and strong, the sun shone strongly into the room, and Bucky was sitting on the couch without a top and with bare feet and the light gilding his hair, and he smiled and joked and talked with Steve, and Steve was back on cloud nine again. They finished eating and fell quiet. Steve curled his feet up on the couch and hugged his mug to him, sighing contentedly, not needing to grab at Bucky; he wasn’t fuelled by neediness right now. He could be happy just to be here in the same room as him. They had time. From opposite ends of the couch they found each other’s eyes and smiled, then Bucky lit a cigarette and laughed when Steve narrowed his eyes at it disapprovingly. Everything felt easy and timeless and wonderful again for a minute. But.

But Bucky was sick.

He was trying extremely hard to be ok, to ignore how crappy he was feeling, and Steve being so lovely undoubtedly made it easier, but nonetheless he felt feverish, and the cigarette was a bad idea, rushing to his head, making him feel even woozier. The strong coffee was giving him the shakes and his stomach started churning around the big breakfast within it. Nausea rent through his abdomen and up his gullet. Saliva souped thickly in his mouth. He turned grey and a cold sweat popped on his forehead, which Steve noticed, so he was reaching for him with concern in his eyes, but just then Bucky had to abruptly stand up and rush into the kitchen to promptly throw up in the sink.

Up came everything he’d eaten, violently and alarmingly quickly, but the heaving carried on and on mercilessly, despite his emptiness, until he brought up bile. Then it finally let him collapse, chest heaving and arm shaking, hanging over the pile of vomit in the sink. He swayed there, his head ringing.

Steve was with him, he realized, stroking his back, making soothing noises. He’d been holding his hair. Steve helped him slide down to the chill of the tiled floor with his back to the kitchen cupboards and rinsed out the sink. Bucky found a cold glass of water pressed to his lips and sipped it weakly.

The acid smell of vomit lingered in the air even after Steve rinsed it down the drain. Bucky’s throat stung from the bile. He was glassy-eyed, his gaze unfocussed. He kind of groaned, feebly, dazed, and he felt chilled all over from the trauma of such intense vomiting. He’d been sick like this several times in the last few weeks, and every time left him more weak and exhausted. Pain and fear were coming for him. His body was so bone-deep tired. Irresistibly, Bucky started to cry.

The tears fell out of him silently. He hadn’t cried properly in years, and he didn’t know what to do about it; he was trying to fight it, frowning and gritting his teeth and making wheezing noises. He’d puked up like this before, felt this dizzying terror and exhaustion before, but every other time he’d been alone, and had just slumped blanked out on the floor until he felt alright enough to get up and clean himself up. He’d never cried. He knew he wasn’t crying now just because of the vomiting, because of the sickness, because of his fear. He was crying because the reason he hadn’t cried in years, the reason he was dead inside, was kneeling in front of him. So much of what Bucky was now had been created, like scar tissue, from the hole that Steve’s death had left in him. But Steve was here. How was he supposed to comprehend that? He didn’t know how to act now that his loss was over, when loss had been his everything.

But he hurt and he felt so scared and hopeless, and Steve was there, kneeling patient and caring by him, and so, while he didn’t know what to do, the only thing it seemed he could do was press his face into Steve’s broad chest and cling to his tshirt in back, so he did. And Steve held him. Steve holding him felt like safety and drowning at the same time, and it made him want to howl.

“Where the _fuck_ ’ve you been Steve,” Bucky hissed through his tears and gritted teeth. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with you _now_ , huh? Why did it have to be now? Why not twenty years ago? Why fucking _now_?” His voice was menacing, and he was butting into Steve’s chest with his head almost hard enough to hurt, a vortex of relief and despair making his words and actions desperate.

“Bucky, I’m so sorry,” Steve whispered into Bucky’s hair. His arms were clamped around him as hard as he could, and he absorbed his anger and his frantic, incoherent movements easily; he was Bucky’s, and he could take all of him. “I’ve been expecting so much. I didn’t realize… I just didn’t realize. I forgot this must be so different for you- for me when I woke up it was like you’d just been gone a week or so, but for you… It’s been so long, hasn’t it?”

“ _So fucking long, Steve,_ ” Bucky gasped. “So _fucking_ long. Why did you have to be so fucking stupid, crash that stupid fucking plane- Oh god, Steve, why did you leave me for so long-” Here his voice cracked and he surrendered himself to weeping, collapsing into Steve’s lap with a heartbreaking cry, his sobs violently shaking his body.

Steve couldn’t say anything. Tears silently streamed down his face and he folded his body over Bucky’s, trying to contain him and help him hold his grief. He tried to tell him with his arms that he was here now, late as it was, and he wasn’t going anywhere, that he was here to stay. He held Bucky tight and didn’t loosen his arms one inch, until his sobs turned into shuddering gasps, and he finally went still.


	4. A Monologue

Bucky, how long has it been since you’ve been fucked? When’s the last time someone touched you? Was it me? Who was the last person to lick your asshole, has anyone done that? Do you remember how much you liked it? Did you know how much I loved it? Do you know how good you taste? I bet you’ve had your cock sucked lots, but I don’t think anyone’s eaten your ass, have they? Has anyone fingered you? Do you remember what that feels like? Has anyone been inside you? Has anyone fucked you? Has anyone made love to you? Has anyone come inside you? Has anyone loved you like I did? Do you remember the first time I put my fingers inside you? The first time my cock? The first time we fucked? Do you remember it? Do you remember we were so young? Do you remember how much we wanted it? All the things we did as well, do you remember jerking off together? Do you remember the first time I touched your cock? We were so young, do you remember? We wanted each other so much.

What about when you went away to war and you wrote me all those dirty letters? Do you remember telling me how you masturbated over me? How much you wanted me? How you fingered yourself and pretended it was me doing it to you? What about when you saw me again? Do you remember what it felt like to see me all big for the first time? Did it make your tummy curl, did it make your asshole clench? Did you think I’d be rough and mean now I was big? I was meaner when I was small. When I got big I didn’t want to hurt you. I wanted to hold you. Do you remember being in my big arms for the first time? Do you remember getting naked in that dim tent and lying beside each other? Do you remember just looking at each other? When we kissed for the first time after so long, lying naked together? Do you remember my mouth on you? Your cock in my mouth? My cock in your ass? Do you remember me crying? I loved you so much, and I’d thought you were dead.

What about after I died? Did you remember? Did you remember me? Did you remember my ass, did you think about it? Did you masturbate remembering me? How tight I was? How much I wanted you? You did, didn’t you. You fucked all those guys and you loved that they wanted you, wanted you inside them. Like I used to. You loved fucking them. But you forgot about wanting it, too, didn’t you? You didn’t let them touch you. You forgot how good that feels. Did it make you feel too sad? Did it make you think of me too much? Did you cry and curse me? Did you hate me for leaving you? Did you blame me? I thought I’d lost you forever. I didn’t want to live without you. Did you want to die too? Were you unhappy? Did you wish you’d died for good?

Have you had any boyfriends? Did anyone ever live here with you? Have you been in love? Have you held someone’s hand? Do you remember walking on the boardwalk in the middle of the night when no-one was there so we could hold hands, and pretending it was the day time? Do you remember kissing? Kissing on the boardwalk? Do you remember our first kiss? Do you remember me giving you a hickey and you were so embarrassed and you wore that scarf to school for a whole week? We were so young, do you ever think about that? Do you remember what it felt like to have a secret like that? Did it make you dizzy like it made me dizzy? 

Did you ever think I’d come back? Did you think about what it would have been like? Being old together? Did you feel the same when you went to war? Did you miss me? Was it the same? Did you think you’d die? What did it feel like when you fell off that train? When you woke up? When you lost your arm? When I was gone? What did it feel like to be without me? I want to know.

I want to know if anyone’s fucked you. I don’t think they have. I don’t think you’d let them. Am I right? Has anyone ever kissed your stump? Licked it? What does it feel like? Remember how I used to love your armpits, how I used to rub my face in them and kiss them? Remember I used to think you smelled so good and I wouldn’t let you shower? Has anyone told you how good you smell? Has anyone made you all sweaty on purpose so they could smell and taste you? Has anyone loved you in the warm afternoon? Has anyone seen your lazy smile when you’re making love in the middle of the afternoon? Has anyone fucked you, Bucky? Has anyone kissed you for hours and hours? Has anyone told you you are beautiful? 

What was it like when you lost your arm? Did anyone help you? Did anyone tell you it was ok? That it is beautiful? Did anyone love you exactly the same as before? When you were clumsy with one hand for the first time did anyone help you unbutton your fly and then suck your cock? What did all those guys think of your stump? Did you let them look at it? Would you let me look at it? Would you let me kiss it? Does it hurt? Do you remember what it felt like to finger me with your left hand? Do you miss it? Your hand, my ass?

Do you still touch yourself? Remember when we talked about touching ourselves and we got so hard and we did it right then and there? Remember when I used to watch you? Do you remember what it felt like to have me watch you? Has anyone watched you? Has anyone watched you in the shower? Have you showered with anyone? Have they washed you? Soaped your body, shampooed your hair?  When did you grow your hair long? How long have you been going gray for? Has anyone ever combed it for you? Did anyone ever stroke and play with it? Can I? Do you want me to? Do you remember the first time we showered together and we were shy? Do you remember pretending we didn’t even have asses that might need cleaning, because we were too embarrassed and shy? Do you remember what it felt like to kiss in the shower under all that water and feel our chests and cocks together? Sucking each other off in the shower? Do you ever think about that when you shower? Does it make you hard?

Do you remember the first time you dared to touch my ass? Do you remember it? Do you remember how it felt? Do you remember feeling nervous? Do you remember not knowing what to do? Do you remember we had to figure out that we needed Vaseline and I ran out straight away and bought some? Remember how crazy you made me? How crazy I made you? What about wanting me to do it to you? When did you first think of it? Do you remember the first time I did it, under the covers, and you almost woke your parents you were so loud?

Has anyone else done it to you, Bucky? Did you want them to? Did you start off but then make them stop? Have you ever cried having sex? Cried when you masturbated? Cried thinking of me?

Did you ever get anyone to hit you? I remember you asked me to once but I wouldn’t. Do you still want that? Did you ever get it if you do? I would do it for you if you wanted now. I would do anything.

Did you ever one single time tell anyone about me? Did you come and then cry and then spill your guts about your dead boyfriend? Did you talk about me? What did you say? Did you tell people who I was, that you were in love with fucking Captain America? When I was gone did you talk to me in your head?

Did you pretend it was me you were fucking when you fucked people? Did you remember me? Did you touch yourself and pretend it was me? Have you fingered yourself? Or not? Have you forgotten what it feels like to have someone inside you? Have you wanted it? Wanted to be stretched out? Wanted a cock there?

Do you remember how many times we fucked each other? Do you remember we tried to keep count to begin with? Do you remember when you told me you never wanted to forget a single time? You tried to write them down but there were too many and they started to blur together, we lost count. How many times do you remember? Do you remember after my mom died and you took me home? Do you remember making love to me then? Do you remember me crying and you holding me? Do you remember promising we’d never leave each other? Do you remember the first time I told you I loved you? Were you scared? I think you were scared. But you were brave and you told me you loved me too. Remember that?

Bucky do you remember how many fucking times we fucked? Do you remember what it felt like to try and try to get enough of each other? To feel like you were going to die if we couldn’t do it? Do you remember making eyes at me in public? Do you remember our codes so we could talk about it and no-one would know? Do you remember being a fucking asshole and saying things you knew would get me hot and hard, just to tease me? Do you remember having to rush into alleyways just to kiss because we couldn’t stand not to a minute longer?

Do you remember fucking in my bed? In yours? On the kitchen table? On your couch? Do you remember making me come in a movie theatre? What about me sucking you off in the bathroom at school? Do you remember how daring we were? How we would laugh about it? Do you remember walking next to each other not being able to touch and trying to make excuses so we could? Being all over each other? Do you remember the time we got caught? Do you remember trying to protect me? Do you remember getting punched? Have you been beaten up since then? Do you get into trouble?

Have you fallen in love with someone you couldn’t have? Has anyone betrayed you? Has anyone broken your heart? Have you been in love? What was it like? Did you feel like you were betraying me? Did you know I would have been happy for you? Or did you not think of me at all?

Please just tell me if anyone’s made love to you.

Does anyone know how you like your neck being kissed? Has anyone bitten you there? Has anyone played with your nipples? No? Has anyone teased you?

Has anyone at all been inside you? Bucky, I have to know if you’ve been fucked at all since me. Please tell me if you have. Please tell me what it was like. And if you haven’t, if you haven’t let anyone have you, in all these years, will you let me? Will you let me have you, Bucky? Will you let me take you? May I touch you? May I love you? May I make love to you? Will you let me be inside you? Will you let me love you? Can I give you everything? Everything you’ve missed? Everything you thought you’d never have again? Everything you want? Anything you want? May I please just love you? Will you let me? May I? Please may I? Tell me. Just please tell me. And I will.


	5. Chapter 5

Over the days and weeks that wound away from the night they were reunited, Steve asked Bucky all these things. Not in so many words of course, but he asked them all the same. He asked Bucky in the way he kissed him, the way he touched his wrecked shoulder and his waist. So many ways. He started asking them that first morning, by gently holding onto Bucky’s forearm when Bucky’d stopped crying and curled out from underneath him, and looking him in the eye and asking him seriously “Are you ok?”. Bucky’s eyes had slid away from his and he had nodded and said,

“Yeah. Fine. Gonna hit the shower.”

And Steve hadn’t pushed it, he’d just smiled and stayed in the kitchen and cleaned up the breakfast stuff, and when Bucky had come back out with wet hair and clean clothes and seen the living room and the kitchen clean and tidy, the look on his face told Steve the answer to a couple of his questions. Bucky looked almost unnerved to have someone taking care of him, doing nice things for him. No sweet devoted boy had lived here, made things homely, and gently chided Bucky for his messiness. Bucky hadn’t wanted a husband who wasn’t Steve; he’d been a perpetual bachelor. Steve felt a little saddened by this realization, but also secretly, selfishly, happy and hopeful. He wouldn’t have been jealous if Bucky had had someone, like that- though for an ice cold second of horror he wondered what he would have done if he’d tracked Bucky down and found him settled down and happy in a long term relationship- but it felt nice to feel like in some way Bucky had been waiting for him, for this. He hoped he was right and that Bucky wanted it to be like this, wanted Steve here in his home, doing the dishes and being his man. He just wanted to look after him, more than anything else in the world.

Steve looked at him, at the long strands of wet hair dripping a dark stain onto the tank top he was wearing, at his tanned bare right arm, at the way he wore the sleeveless top so nonchalantly, completely at ease with having his stump on view. Bucky noticed him looking and smiled a little, letting Steve know he didn’t mind, and Steve sat down on the arm of the couch and studied it more intently.

“How does it feel?” He asked, and Bucky stepped up to him so he could get a good look, the stump at his face level.

Steve raised a hand and ran it round the healthy curve of the top of his shoulder, round to where it folded and gnarled in on itself. His fingertips undulated over the scar tissue, feeling all the way round to Bucky’s armpit, where his hair was still damp and warm from the shower.

To Bucky’s surprise, he found himself flushing when Steve’s fingers traced the lines of his shoulder, and sighing when they carefully explored its bumps and crevices. He frowned and closed his eyes, steadying himself with his hand on Steve’s shoulder, caught off guard by how intimate it felt to have the stump touched that way, so lovingly. It tugged at him somewhere in his belly. Just as Steve thought, no-one in Bucky’s life had cared to be so careful and gentle with the stump as this, had wanted to take the time to get to know it.

And no-one else had known him before, when he was whole. He looked down at Steve’s face and memories he’d put away long ago came rising up, unbidden: Being Steve’s sniper, steadying the barrel of his rifle in his left hand while his right index finger curled round the trigger, covering Steve on an op in the snowy alpine forests. Being on a train, trapped in a carriage with merciless Hydra agents, catching Steve’s thrown gun and taking up his shield, wearing it on his left arm just like Captain America, moments before he was blasted from the carriage, and fell, and lost Steve and his arm and everything. Even earlier memories, of his two arms being measured for uniform, of fitting them into khaki for the first time. Hugging Steve goodbye with them, in that awful fight, because Bucky hadn’t wanted Steve to try and enlist, and hadn’t he been right? None of this would have happened if Steve hadn’t been so stubborn. Steve would have stayed small and stayed safe at home, and eventually the war would have been won and over (but how could that have happened without Steve? A paradox). And Bucky would have come home to him, whole and still young, and they would have lived a normal life, and by now they would be sweet and old and winding down to spend the last years of their long life together by each other’s side. How many times in the last four decades had he thought of that, savagely longed for that _if only_? If only.

But now, despite everything, despite the time and the regrets and the sickness, Steve was back. Steve was looking up through his long eyelashes that cast shadows on his cheeks in the bright noon sunshine, as he lifted his lips to Bucky’s stump and kissed it. Bucky looked down and watched him do it. No-one had ever kissed him there before. It felt ticklish, it felt sweet. It made a lump rise in his throat. Bucky couldn’t believe this was really happening. He moved his hand from Steve’s shoulder to his face and closed it round his jaw and pulled his face back, tilting it up, wanting to study it. Steve gazed up at him, quiet in his grasp, solemn, there, solid and real. It was real. Steve was real. Bucky ran his thumb over Steve’s cheekbone, pressed it to his lower lip. Steve moved his lips to kiss his thumb, not breaking eye contact. His hand was still on Bucky’s stump, gently squeezing.

The sunlight gilded them there, a perfect still moment in time.

Steve smiled slowly, a warm sunny smile of love, as bright as the light on their faces, because another of his questions was answered. He could tell how moved Bucky was, being touched there, for the first time.

Then he asked,

“So. What are we gonna do with this day we’ve got ourselves?”

 

*

 

Bucky wanted Steve to show him where he was living, and so what they did that afternoon was travel downtown to Steve’s awful apartment on the subway. They stood among the crowds, unable to believe they were really there together, swaying side-by-side on the noisy little train, and they couldn’t stop staring at each other. They both tried to be secretive about it, but when their eyes inevitably met they both found it hard to look away.

When they arrived at Steve’s fourth-story apartment Bucky took his time looking around, steps muffled in the silent sterile plush new rooms, feeling very aware of the present, of what 1982 felt like. It felt like loneliness. Compared to his own old apartment in Brooklyn, or the tenement where Steve had lived as a child, this place was so soulless. Bucky, experiencing the process of change gradually as the years slowly turned, hadn’t noticed how much New York had altered. But seeing it through Steve’s eyes was making him realise just how different everything was now, how much bleaker. They had lived in poverty in Brooklyn, in their youth, and it had been hard, but it had been vibrant and alive. Never sad and empty like this.

He went into the bedroom and looked at Steve’s bed. On the side where Steve slept the sheets were barely mussed, the pillow straight and showing only the slightest dent from his head. Steve had barely left a trace. The other side was totally neat and tucked in, Army style, with the pillows plump and square and uncreased, because no-one had ever slept there. That bed said so much about the way Steve lived, and it made Bucky even sadder than the rest of the joyless apartment did.

So his heart was already full and sorrowful, and then he found Steve’s shield.

It was propped like a useless relic in the hallway, unneeded and overlooked. When was the last time Steve had worn and used it? What war could Captain America fight now, in this evil-hearted decade? How could it have happened that Steve had become an anachronism, and his shield an artefact? For a second Bucky fiercely wished that Steve hadn’t been brought back, so he wouldn’t have had to see how the country he sacrificed himself to save had betrayed his memory. Time had been so ruthless, to the both of them. Bucky’s heart felt so tired and used up by it, and it was with a feeling of something breaking that he dropped to his knees next to the shield and ran a finger through the dust that dulled it.

As Bucky examined the apartment Steve stood in the living room looking around as if he was seeing the place for the first time, too, and he felt sweaty and embarrassed at what it said about him. He hadn’t noticed before quite how bad it was, realising now how it must seem to Bucky. So empty. He swallowed when Bucky rubbed clean a shining streak of red white and blue through the dust on his shield, and tried to say something, offer an explanation for the state of it, but his tongue didn’t seem to want to work. Bucky crouched beside it and looked at it for a long time, and Steve recalled the time on the train, just before Bucky had fallen, when he’d wielded it. He wondered if Bucky was thinking of the same thing, but it felt impossible to ask him; they’d said precisely nothing about the past so far- there was so much there that if they started they might never stop. He didn’t know how to even begin. So Steve just stood there silently, holding onto one of his sleeves, with his cheeks hot from the strange shame of having his sad little new life scrutinised, uncovered by the one person who used to know every detail of everything he’d ever done.

Eventually Bucky got up from his crouch by the shield, slowly, thoughtfully, and came over to Steve. Steve twisted his lips and opened his hands into the air like he was welcoming Bucky as a guest.

“Well it’s not much, but it’s home,” he said, with a brave smile that only just failed to meet his eyes.

Bucky didn’t smile back. He came up close to Steve and Steve chewed his lip around his shy embarrassed half smile, and twisted his hands together, trying to excuse the state of things. Bucky’s eyes were sad and grave and he shook his head as he reached out and touched Steve’s face, his smooth young cheek and strong young jaw. Then he slid his hand around Steve’s neck to his nape and pulled him close so he could crane up to place a kiss on his sweet soft forehead.

Steve’s eyes closed and his brow furrowed beneath Bucky’s lips, and suddenly he felt close to tears, heat prickling his eyelids. He put his arms around Bucky. They stood and held each other close like that for a long time, in the silent apartment, sharing a deep sadness for the time they’d lost, for what time had made them become.

“This is not your home, Steve.” Bucky said firmly. Being in this apartment had made him realise that Steve had lost so much, too, had lost his purpose and lost his time, and lost almost everyone. Bucky had been forgetting that it wasn’t just himself who had suffered. He knew he was the only thing that Steve had left now: he had to face up to being his everything, and he would, he would, he would be whatever Steve needed. While he could. “Your home’s where it’s always been: your home’s in Brooklyn. Your home’s with me.”

Steve nodded against Bucky’s shoulder, making a few wet tears slide on his scarred skin, because Bucky’s words and his arm around him did make him feel, for the first time since they’d woken him up in the hospital- for the first time since Bucky fell- that he was home. He hadn’t realised just how deeply homesick he had been, all this time. He clutched him tight. 

Then they got the hell out of that apartment and never went back.

Steve took his few important possessions (shield, passport) and some clothes in a black trash bag back with them on the subway. Bucky laughed at Steve clutching the concealed shield to his chest, trying not to bash people with it, in the crowded rush hour train- the incongruity of it.

And so, like that, Steve moved in with Bucky. Just like he’d planned, just like it was always meant to have happened, only a bit late, and a bit strange. But they got used to it.

 

*

 

They walked home from the subway stop meanderingly. The evening sun was starting to get low and orange as it dropped towards the rooftops and its light made everything feel nostalgic, and they found themselves unwilling to go back to the apartment. Instead they wandered around the neighborhood, looking at things. They didn’t say much; they didn’t have to. If Steve paused and let his eyes linger on an alleyway, he didn’t need to explain why, because Bucky knew. He might have walked past that alleyway countless times since the 1940s, and not given it a second thought, but with Steve by his side it was like no time had passed and he was back there in the past with him. He was surprised how many memories were resurfacing, just because Steve was back. He was surprised by how much he must have wilfully blocked out, and he was glad that some part of him had known to do so, because there was no way he could have stayed here all these years walking around with a heart as full as this. His heart would have broken a thousand times each day.

Steve’s heart was breaking in a different way. The city had changed so much since he’d been gone. It was dirtier, it was greyer, it was more full of human misery. Sure it hurt that some of the places he remembered had been torn down or rendered unrecognisable, but it hurt far more to see how many denizens of New York these days were in such obvious abject suffering. He’d seen it before, when he’d been roaming around hunting for Bucky, but it hit harder, here, in this place that had always been home, with Bucky by his side. Homelessness and drug dealers and little kids who looked half-starved and dirty and downtrodden. Smudgy dirt on all the buildings, run-down no-hope businesses, broken glass and graffiti, chewing gum and cigarette ends on the sidewalk and even needles and yellowing condoms in the gutter. And none of that would have been so bad if it had been like the old days with happy gangs of kids playing in the streets and their mothers stood around gossiping, if the community had still been strong. That was obviously a thing of the past, though. No-one seemed to want to spend more time outside than they had to, they rushed here and there with no time for one another. It was too dangerous, Steve guessed. It was so sad. All that was left of how it once was were the memories of these two old-timers, who had once been happy and carefree here, once upon a long-lost time.

So they walked around, stopping and pausing, and occasionally meeting each other’s eyes and nodding or smiling a little. Not talking. No need for talking. They both knew, they both remembered just the same. That street corner, that building which used to be a bar, even just a strip of sidewalk. Drenched in history, in significance. It was too sweet for words. It was too sad for them.

As they walked their eyes met, constantly, but they didn’t touch. It wasn’t safe for them to hold hands or wind their arms together out on the street in this neighborhood- it wouldn’t have been safe anywhere in New York. They were used to that, though, and the looks that passed between them were eloquent enough of the feeling that was deep and strong and growing between them. There was no need to touch or speak. The evidence of their love revealed itself in that look in both of their eyes and was present on every street corner, built into their bodies and into the very architecture around them. The Brooklyn boys, back in town.

 

So they walked on, approaching the Hudson, heading in the direction of the boardwalk which had been their playground as little kids and their secret garden as young lovers, where they’d stolen away at night to hold hands looking over the waves and kiss under the stars.

 

All day long, Bucky had been fine, he’d made himself be fine. The vomiting had shaken him, but not too bad, and he was fine. He was fine, but all this walking was getting to him, he inevitably had to admit to himself. He was in denial about how weak his body was becoming; he was used to stomping around the city in his big boots, he was used to staying up all hours, he was used to energetically fucking, and getting into fights, and travelling all around the country on a whim with only a few dollars in his pocket and the clothes on his back. It felt terrifying, that a trip downtown and a stroll around the neighborhood could be enough to make him want to sit down, even feel a little dizzy. He was forced to admit it to himself, but that didn’t mean he had to say anything to Steve. He didn’t want him to know.

He didn’t say anything, but his pace was slowing and Steve kept glancing at him in a way that made him realise his face must be pale or showing creases of fatigue around his mouth, regardless of his intentions to be stoical. Steve was giving him that look of his, that concerned, loving look, that look of worry and care, and it made Bucky’s heart feel like it was going to fail him right then and there to be looked at that way; what he’d learned to live without, given back to him, so easy. And because Steve was his lovely, tactful self and knew Bucky so well, he knew not to ask “Are you ok?” or suggest they go home, but instead he casually stopped at a hot dog stand so they could get something to eat, as if it was for no particular reason rather than an effort to shore up Bucky’s strength. Then, Steve knowing that Bucky knew that he knew what was up, they made the unspoken decision to skip the boardwalk and wend their way back, and soon they were home at Bucky’s place. At _their_ place, Steve reminded himself, still not quite able to believe it.  

* 

Steve pulled his shield out of the trash bag and placed it carefully against the wall on the floor by the couch. It looked out of place- when Stark gave it to him, far away in Europe, in a by-gone age, Steve never would have dreamed that he and it would ever have found their way home, back here. The sun had passed behind the rooftops of the buildings next door, making everything look dull and lifeless in the shabby living room. The shield was the brightest thing there, sitting colorful and refulgent like it didn’t remember it had lain frozen in ice for decades and then been abandoned and allowed to become clouded with dust, like it didn't know it was in the wrong time.

Steve let his hand linger on its rim, pausing before he turned away from it, and from that and from the set of Steve’s shoulders Bucky could tell that he was about to get serious.

“You’re not okay, are you.” Steve asked quietly, with his back to Bucky, still touching the shield.

Bucky was silent for a little too long, and Steve knew he was debating with himself whether or not to lie. Eventually, though, Bucky said,

“I dunno.” Just that, without elaboration. Steve turned to him with his lip bitten and an eyebrow quirked, requiring a better answer. Bucky shrugged and then hugged his arm to himself, turning his head away, evading Steve’s probing look. “I dunno, I dunno what else to say, Steve. You saw. This morning. That’s what’s going on, I guess, I dunno. You know as much as me.”

Steve sighed and put his hands on his hips. Then, restive, frustrated, he laced them at the back of his head, stretching out his shoulders. Bucky had not got any less obtuse and ornery or any more willing to talk about things in the last forty years, then.

“C’mon, Buck,” he said, tilting his head and frowning, raising his fingers from his scalp beseechingly. 

Bucky didn’t respond. He shouldered past Steve and sank onto the couch, wiggled his cigarettes out of his jeans pocket and lit one, and then sat with his feet planted and his knees parted, his elbow resting on one as he smoked and stared sightlessly a few feet in front of him, shoulders hunched and his hair hanging in his face.

Steve knew this mood, knew what it meant when Bucky went like this, all frowning and taciturn and stubborn. It meant something was really eating him, but he couldn’t bring himself to open up and talk about it. It was immigrant-kid machismo, soldier machismo, tough fag machismo; a willful struggle to deny anything was hurting you, putting a barrier between yourself and your hurt, gritting your teeth til it went away. Tough guys don’t talk about shit. Steve chewed his lip. Sure, Bucky had always had his steely side, but Steve had barely seen anything _but_ that side in the 24 hours they’d been reunited. Had Bucky lost all his sunshine, all his sweetness, back in 1944? Had it gone down with Steve? The thought was unbearable.

Steve sighed, long, gusty, a sigh to give himself strength. Then he picked up an ashtray from the table and plonked it on the arm of the couch next to Bucky- _here, you’re gonna make a mess and you know I’m the one who’ll have to clean it up, jackass_ being the unspoken commentary- and sat next to him, close, the couch cushions giving way to tilt their weights together. Bucky glanced at him out the corner of his eye and went right on back to smoking, impassive. Steve stared at him and didn’t let up, boring his gaze into the side of Bucky’s face until it became too obvious that Bucky was avoiding it, so that he was forced to huff a laugh and shake his head or else look like an asshole.

“Goddamnit, Rogers, I always knew you for a stubborn sum’bitch and you ain’t changed none on that front.” he said, stubbing out his cigarette and cocking a half-grin despite himself, knocking his shoulder friendlily into Steve’s.

“You gonna talk to me now?” Steve pounced, not optimistically. He was certain it wouldn’t be that easy, and he was right; Bucky dipped his head again and became engrossed in picking his fingernails with his thumb.

“Don’t really know what there is to say, Rogers. Like I said, you seen how it is.” He picked away at his middle finger, the click of his nails loud in the silence, studiously avoiding Steve’s gaze, pretending he wasn’t there.

“Bucky, c’mon,” pleaded Steve, softly. Bucky still didn’t let up picking, like it was the most fascinating pursuit in the world.  “Bucky…” He raised his hand and pushed a lock of hair away from Bucky’s forehead, letting his touch linger.

“Rogers, quit.” Bucky said, sighing like Steve was being a trial, like he wanted to swat him away. As far as he was concerned, they weren’t having this conversation.

“ _You_ quit,” Steve replied, suddenly pissed off. “Quit calling me Rogers. Quit acting like there’s nothing wrong, like I can’t tell you’re all eaten up from that sour look on your face. Buck- jeez, would you at least look at me?”

Bucky, goaded, obeyed. When he turned to Steve his face was angry, red and frowning, tears somewhere not far from the surface, but he wasn’t angry at Steve. His anger was aimed all inside, a weapon that he was trying to use to keep everything in there pressed down.

“Ok, I’m looking at you,” he flared. “Happy? What is it you want me to say, Steve? What is it exactly that you want me to say?”

That was better. Steve knew what to do with Bucky all testy and riled; it was so much better than having him withdrawn and unmovable. He could work with pissed off.

“Tell me what’s causing that sour face. You know I’ve been waiting forty years to see that face and it’s not exactly a sight for sore eyes when you go and twist it up all like that. You have to admit, it’s really not fair on me. Worse’n getting woken up with Ronald Reagan hanging over me like some kinda creepy Halloween mask, that face of yours.” This was slightly risky, could go either way; when Bucky was truly angry he didn’t take joshing too well. Thankfully, amazingly considering he hadn’t done this in so long, Steve had read him right. Bucky bunched his lips and rolled his eyes, trying to stop it from happening, but he was already breathing out another reluctant laugh, his lips curling at the side.

“I swear to God Rogers, you’ve only been back one day and you’re already driving me up a wall,” he groaned, but all the same he leant back against the back of the sofa and threw his arm along it, opening up his body language, saying with it: _yeah, ok_. “Besides, whose fault was it that you been waiting so long, hey? Don’t go blamin’ _me_.” Bucky’s turn to take a risk- could they really be flippant about that yet? But Steve was game. He was just happy to know that Bucky in 1982 wasn’t all that different after all, still only needed a little prodding to get him to smile. He was happy he could make him smile.

“I said quit calling me Rogers, _Sergeant Barnes_. Think I tracked you down after all this time just so as you could go treating me like a stranger?” He paused, then went on with his voice lower, softer, striking in with a lance now he’d gotten Bucky’s defences down, “Don’t go treating me like a stranger, Buck. Please talk to me.”

There was a pause in which Bucky tilted his chin and swallowed. He looked up at the ceiling and moved his lips, whispering something Steve didn’t quite catch. It sounded like it might’ve been _Swear to God_. Then he sighed, admitting defeat.

“Alright, have it your way,” he grumbled, and sighed again. It sounded shakier than he meant it to. There was a silence in which Bucky pressed his hand to his eyes before running it round to the back of his head, trying to find words. This was very hard. “Yeah, I’m not okay.” He finally admitted, gruffly. Then he swallowed, and glanced at Steve, who was looking at him so tender that it hurt.

“It’s this disease?” Steve ventured softly, not wanting to press too hard and make Bucky close off again, but it was safe now, Bucky was with him, had steeled himself to talk.

“Yeah… Christ, Steve, you really don’t know. How bad it is out there. Everyone’s scared to fucking death, you just have no way of knowing. Cuz it comes out of nowhere, see? You know this guy, you see him around, he’s fun, he’s so young, he’s having the time of his life. And then, blam. He disappears. You ask around after him but people avoid your questions, like we’re olden days peasants who believe if you talk about the devil he’s gonna come and get you, all superstitious like it’s a curse. But eventually you find out he died, he lay alone in his fucking room dying because no-one wanted to come near and risk catching it, and he died like that, alone. Just gone, and no-one knows why. And it’s different every time- people talk about rashes, or tumors, or a cough you just can’t manage to shift. I ain’t heard no-one talk about puking, but you know what? No-one really knows a god damn thing. They’re calling it ‘the gay cancer’ but it ain’t like cancer. Cancer’s scary as shit but if you get it people’ll rally round, they’ll take you to hospital and the doctors’ll help you and everyone’ll say how sad it is, how you didn’t deserve to go that way. This thing, no way, it’s like you got the plague, it’s like you’re a leper. Even the other queers, your own people, the people you probably fuckin’ caught it off in the first place, they’ll turn you away. Your friends. Because no-one knows, no-one has a fucking clue, and it’s safer to turn a blind eye, turn your back, cross your fingers and pray it will pass over you, that you’ll be spared. It’s understandable, right? Would you risk it? When everyone has their own theory how it gets passed on, and every single one of them is different and probably more wrong than the next? Would you want to know someone anymore who’s turned into a fucking time bomb, one-man chemical warfare? What if you held their hand and that ended up killing you? What if they even just sneezed and that was that? When there’s nothing you can do to save them anyway? Would you stay with them? Would you risk it? Would you?”

Once Bucky started talking he found he couldn’t stop, getting more upset, more burned up with despair and heartbreak, rambling on, but suddenly he brought himself up abruptly, because he realised what he was asking. What he was asking Steve. He inhaled sharply, shocked with himself, and his eyes went hot and he couldn’t help flicking them to Steve’s face, his expression wild, stricken, unable to take back what he’d unwittingly stumbled into confessing being terrified of, and equally unable to voice his desperate craving for reassurance, his need for comfort. Yeah, so this was why he hadn’t wanted to talk about it. He didn’t want Steve to know that he was scared to death of being left alone again. That he was scared to death of dying alone.

Steve was breathing fast. Bucky’s words had revealed a bleak new world to him, worse than anything he’d already seen in this awful future. He thought of the men that Bucky must have known, his friends that he must have lost. Collective grief and terror chiseling out the heart of a whole community; he could taste the fear. And he could feel Bucky’s own, personal fear. He could read it on his face. That _look_ on Bucky’s face- it cut him to his core- it was smashing something inside him- because he’d seen it before. Steve had seen it before and he had taken Schmidt’s plane down into the Arctic with himself inside because he couldn’t live with the fact of having seen it, with seeing it in his mind every moment he was awake, and every time he shut his eyes, and every time he dreamed. He hadn’t been able to survive the knowledge of what Bucky’s face looked like when he knew he was about to die. It was a look no-one should have to see twice in a lifetime; Steve felt like the entire left side of his chest was caving in, the pain was so strong. It wasn’t fair, it couldn’t be true, he couldn’t- he couldn’t lose- not again- impossible-

Then he inhaled deeply, and clenched his fists, and his face went so steely that it almost alarmed Bucky. There was another part of the story, the reason why Steve had died. The unbearable thing hadn’t just been Bucky knowing he was going to die, it had been Bucky knowing he was going to die and yet stretching his hand out, begging Steve to save him, thinking he would right ‘til the very end. It was Steve’s fault that Bucky had been there, Steve’s fault he had fallen, and Steve’s failure that he hadn’t saved him. Steve was not going to fail Bucky again. He would do anything he could.

Because in some hideous way that spanned decades, like fate had been laying a trap for him, this was his fault too. If he hadn’t gone down, if he’d been stronger, if he’d been able to cope, if he’d waited just a few more days… Bucky would never have been alone. Bucky’s life would never have ended up this way and he would never have gotten sick. Steve didn’t doubt the fact of the sickness any more, could see no way of bargaining with the truth- Bucky’s terror was too real. The vomiting had been so much, and Bucky’s fatigue, too- all undeniable. The responsibility for it settled on Steve’s shoulders. He visibly squared them to bear it.

His nostrils flared as he found Bucky’s wild eyes, his own opaque and dense with sorrow and determination. He touched Bucky’s face with both of his hands, he squeezed it, he roughly caressed it, his eyes roaming along with his fingers as he explored it and claimed it. Bucky’s dear face, aged and broken with fear. He wished he could wipe the fear clean away. But at least he could hold it, hold it for him. Steve’s voice came out gravelly when he said,

“I don’t care. Look, I’ll hold your hand,” and he did, he grabbed it, roughly, again with two hands. He rubbed his thumbs on the back of it, he linked their fingers, he couldn’t stop moving his touch around on it, and he raised it to his lips and pressed kisses to it. “You think I care?”

Bucky was stricken into silence, his eyes still flickering. He couldn’t say anything. Steve was, Steve was so-

“I’ll kiss you.” Steve continued fiercely, like it was a threat. “That’s gotta be as unhygienic as being sneezed on, right? You think it’s gonna kill me? I’ll kiss you, Bucky, I don’t even care, you understand? I gotta- -” Steve interrupted himself by pressing a kiss on Bucky’s mouth, messy, hard so that Bucky felt the sharpness of his teeth behind his lips, careless, like he couldn’t help himself. He stayed close to Bucky’s face and his voice went into a whisper that was almost menacing, “I’ll stay right by your side for every single minute, I swear to you, I’ll swear to anything. I swear to you you’re mine, Buck I swear... Oh, Buck, remember- you gotta remember it- to the end of the line. You remember. To the end of the line, Buck, I swear it, I mean it, I’m with you, ‘til the very end…”

“Steve-” Bucky finally managed, his voice cracking. His own words, Steve telling him his own words back to him, it was unbearable… Of course Bucky remembered. How could he ever let himself forget Steve’s little pinched face and ridiculous overblown pride, Steve’s fragile collarbone under his thumb. Steve’s smile, his shrug, his sigh, his slim lithe body coming into his arms... Bucky nodded and felt tears choking his throat as he raised his right hand, his only fucking hand, and put it on Steve’s shoulder, placed just exactly where he’d placed it back then. His thumb was on Steve's clavicle, but this time his fingers weren’t wrapped all the way round to practically touch Steve’s spine, his hand wasn’t as big as his whole shoulder anymore. Didn’t matter.

He was nodding and frowning and one of Steve’s hands had flown up to cover his, crushing it to his chest. And then all of a sudden they were kissing with their mouths open, making muffled noises, grasping at each other. They kissed like it was already the last time.

Steve stood up, managing to do so without breaking the kiss, Bucky following his lips, hungry for them. Steve backed over the carpet, still holding Bucky’s hand to his chest. This time Bucky didn’t pull him back.

They made it into the bedroom. The last of the evening light made it dim. Steve turned as he reached the doorway, standing ready and poised with the soft light behind him, because Bucky had paused at the doorway and Steve could tell he was frightened. Steve held out his hand.

“Come on, Bucky.” He said, softly. “Come on, c’mere…”

Bucky stepped forward. He couldn’t believe it, he was actually _nervous_ \- his heart was pounding- but still he came up to Steve, who ran his hand into his hair and kissed his neck.

“Steve.” Bucky said, not quite able to go with it without some resistance. He could feel his skin prickling into goosebumps from Steve’s damp breath. “Listen. You don’t have to do this.”

“Shut up,” Steve breathed, his eyes hot and sparkling.

Steve stripped out of his tshirt, and he unfastened his belt and pushed everything down in one go, wriggling out his socks as he stepped out of the tangle of pants and underwear. He tugged at the hem of Bucky’s tank and Bucky hesitated, but he did it, he raised his arm to let Steve pull the top off. He shivered as it whisked over his back. He stood still and looked down at Steve unbuttoning his jeans and pulling his pants down. He passively stepped out of them when they pooled round his ankles. Then Steve ran his thumbs into the waistband of Bucky's boxers and pulled them off, so all of their clothes lay in a warm crumpled pile together on the floor.

Naked together for the first time in forty years.

Steve was smiling and looking at Bucky with joy in his eyes, and he flopped himself down on the bed, stretching himself full length, luxurious and confident in his nakedness, holding out his hand again.

Bucky stood still for a moment. Nudity felt strange; he usually fucked with all his clothes on. He wasn’t shy, he was too goddamn old and battle-hardened to be shy, it was just that he was very aware of himself, of his mangled shoulder and his stump, and all of his scars, of how his arm and shoulders and the patch of skin below his throat were far more tanned than the rest of his torso, of the speckles of grey in his pubic hair, of his thighs, and his ass, and his soft dick jutting in front of him.

Haltingly he followed Steve, kneeling onto the mattress. Steve lay back with his eyes dark and shining and watched him approach. Steve’s body was all planes of pale skin and pooling shadows between his muscles, long and lean and gorgeous in the warm evening air, and his pretty young cock was already hard. It rested against his hip. Something Bucky had tried to forget- how keen for it Steve always was, even before the war had changed his body.

“Look at you. My God, Stevie, how’ve I survived this long…” Bucky said, not quite able to finish that sentence. “Unbelievable, after all this time, after everything,” He murmured, mostly to himself. “Unbelievable. Still the sexiest thing I ever saw in my whole sorry life, still the most beautiful goddamn thing on this godforsaken planet...”

Bucky reached out to touch, but Steve shook his head and batted his hand away.

“Lie down, Buck. Just shut up, alright,” he said, and the way his voice sounded made Bucky’s dick twitch. “Just shut up, just c’mere…”

Bucky swallowed and pulled his socks off quickly before he did as he was told, getting down on his side, a little awkwardly, propping himself up on his elbow. Now didn’t have any choice; he couldn’t touch Steve, though he felt something in his brain hankering to move muscles that had long ago ceased to exist. He didn’t often make the mental mistake of reaching for something with his left hand, but he almost did just then. Touching Steve was something from when he’d had it, and it seemed the muscle memory of loving him was stronger even than forty years' worth of learning to not have two arms anymore.

“What are you doing…” Bucky murmured warily, because Steve had wiggled up to him and slid an arm round his waist, making use of the gap where Bucky’s left arm wasn’t to push his hand up Bucky’s back, and slide it up and down it. His fingers swept over his skin, light, and then started kneading in, massaging up on his shoulders and down near his ass, in the dimples there, into the stiff muscles of his hips. It was making Bucky shiver, sensations he hadn’t felt in years rising in his belly, his chest. His throat choked up again and his thighs started to feel heavy. His cock was stirring, rising between their two bodies. “Steve, what’re you doing, you gotta be careful…”

“Yeah I’m being careful, dummy… ‘Sides, what did I say? Didn’t I say I don’t care? I don’t care Bucky, I just gotta…”

“Steve,” Bucky began, meaning to protest, but just then Steve dipped his head so he could kiss Bucky’s neck in earnest, sucking and licking, down to the hollow of his collarbone by his stump, and his hand was working lower, kneading the meat of his ass, and that made Bucky catch his breath. “Ah! Jesus, Steve, c’mon, wait, I’m not joking here. You _have_ to be _careful_.”

“I’ve already kissed you, haven’t I?” Steve said, pulling back and looking up into Bucky’s face, his expression humorous. Steve’s fucking _evil_ gallows humor, something most people would never expect Captain America to have, something even Bucky had almost forgotten about. “Didn’t you say that means I’m already doomed?”

“Knock it off, don’t be dumb. I said that’s what _some_ people think, you think that’s really how it works? Fucking everyone would be dead if it was kissing. Real scientific-minded, Steve. Just like always, you big idiot.”

Steve sighed and pulled back properly, but Bucky noted that he didn’t move his hand off his ass. “Well, ok, then how _does_ it work, Mr. Egghead?”

“You know I don’t know.”

“You must have some idea.”

“Well, yeah… It’s just conjecture, mind,” Bucky warned, “But I think it’s something to do with the ass. Maybe like a bacteria or a virus or something. That’s the only way I could’ve got it, fucking a guy in the ass. And y’know if it’s mainly gay guys getting it it makes sense, cuz you know what we’re all up to…”

Steve snorted. He wasn’t the only one who could be accused of a bad case of black humor. Then he wiggled himself up on Bucky so that their skin was touching everywhere and said,

“Say that again…”

“Say what again.”

“Fucking a guy in the ass… Sounds so hot when you say it, Buck,” Steve murmured, closing his eyes and starting to kiss Bucky’s shoulder again, digging his fingers into Bucky’s strongly muscled asscheek. “God, Bucky, I wanna fuck you, I wanna fuck you in the ass…”

Something that felt like a tidal wave punched into Bucky’s stomach and washed over the rest of him, part fear, part shock, and part hot, breathtaking desire. He gasped, “You’re a sick fuck, Rogers, didn’t you hear what I just said? Don't it scare you? It fucking _should_ scare you-”

“Not really." Steve shrugged. It was true. He had absolutely no fear for himself, not when he'd seen that look on Bucky's face, and had to live with knowing what was going to happen to him. "I don’t care Buck, I really don’t care...”

“Well _I_ fucking care, Steve, Jesus. I’m not just gonna let you--! What’d’ya take me for? Jesus! Stop, you’re crazy.”

“I’ll stop if you really want me to,” Steve said, cruelly, because how could Bucky want this to stop? How could he, when Steve’s hand was on his ass and his fingers were circling closer and closer to the dip between his cheeks, teasing and light. Teasing him with something he’d never thought he’d ever feel again. Steve’s kisses were on his neck, his chest, his stump, and Steve’s skin was hot and velvety all over and Bucky could feel his chest swelling against his own every time he breathed. The last thing in the world that Bucky wanted was for Steve to stop, but valiantly Bucky still told himself no, fiercely, trying to cling to common sense, but his cock was betraying him. It was hard as hell now, making Bucky want to rut his hips, and Steve’s was too. Bucky could feel it digging into his hip.

“You want me to stop, Buck?” Steve continued mercilessly, breathing it into Bucky’s ear like a seasoned seductress. “Just tell me. But you know what I said, I’m staying with you, I’m gonna be with you, and I wanna be _with_ you, you hear me? I ain’t gonna just be your nursemaid, Buck, God, Bucky, it’s crazy how much I want you, you’re driving me crazy. I want you to feel good, I want you to feel _me_. In you. Buck, I wanna be in you. I gotta be inside you Buck-” Steve’s voice rushed on, breathy and low, hot, and he was getting seriously overheated. Both of his hands were on Bucky. He pushed Bucky down onto his back and his hands went everywhere, stroking with his hot palms, desperate to feel him. Steve’s mouth was open and his eyes were shut as he panted out his words onto Bucky’s skin, pressing kisses inbetween them all over his neck, his chest, his face.

Bucky’s breathing was coming out ragged. He let Steve feel him, he let Steve’s word pierce him, he let himself grunt with arousal just from what Steve was saying, just from his big strong hands.

“Steve, ah fuck, Steve… I haven’t done it, I’ve never done it like that with anyone, not- not since- Ah, God, I want it, Steve, you crazy reckless fuck, I want it- What’re you even doing, you’re makin’ me go fuckin’ crazy, I can’t handle this, we can’t do this, we fucking can’t…” He murmured in a low, tortured voice, tormented by Steve’s relentless touch and by the struggle of desire and reason fighting a bitter battle in his chest. He’d fucked so many times since Steve, but never once had he felt like this, hot all over and panting, like he was gonna die if he couldn’t have it. He’d forgotten his body could even feel this way. It was terrifying, how undone Steve was making him. He wanted him so badly.

“I know. I know, Bucky, I know you haven’t,” Steve said soothingly. He backed off a little, taking them down from the frenzy that was clearly ripping Bucky apart, but he kept his hands on him, kept them moving, kept Bucky panting from it. “And I do know, I know it’s dangerous… But how about just my fingers, that’s gotta be ok… You don’t catch diseases just from touching…”

“I don’t know,” Bucky replied, hoping desperately that Steve was right, “I don’t know, uhh-” he grunted, interrupting himself, because Steve’s arm was all the way round him, behind his back, holding him tight and close, and his index finger had found and was hesitating at the apex of his cleft. Steve’s finger lightly stroked there, teasing, maddening, dipping down just a tiny bit so that Bucky got a hint of what it was going to feel like-

“Yeah, yeah, ok, do it, fuck Steve, oh fuck, just do it. Do it. Get the slick. Get the fucking slick. It’s on the floor somewhere…” It was too much.

Steve scrambled away to find it and Bucky thumped himself onto his stomach, smashing his face into a pillow and crooking his arm round his head. His heart was pounding so hard it felt like the mattress was throbbing. The few seconds he lay there while he waited, listening to Steve throwing stuff around searching for the pot of vaseline, felt like some of the longest of his life. He was hyperaware of his ass, naked to the air, of the fact he was face down, ass up, of the fact his ass hadn’t had anything near it in four decades. The last time Steve had been in him- when was it? In a tent somewhere, for sure, in Europe, they would have had to have been quiet so the other Commandos didn’t hear anything, come on, he must be able to remember the specific time- he couldn’t, they were all blurred together, mixed with other images, of being inside Steve, of sucking him off, of all the filthy things they did together- the main specific Bucky could remember from that era was how his stomach had dropped when he’d seen Steve’s new body for the first time, how he’d gotten immediately hard and wanted Steve inside him…

Just then Steve crawled onto the mattress and Bucky snapped back to the present so fast it made his heart skip a beat. This was gonna happen. Jesus fuck. Steve’s weight was so massive, Bucky could feel it from the way the mattress bent under his knees, from the way that made his own body move. Bucky was not used to this at all, being vulnerable and on his front. It made him feel filthy, it made him feel young, it made him feel like nothing he’d done in the rest of his life could possibly have ever moved him, when he could’ve had this, when Steve wanted him like this. The only man he’d ever spread his legs for. Here was Bucky Barnes, the ultimate cruiser, about ready to die from the mere prospect of getting fingered. He rubbed his dick against the sheets, helplessly hard and craving contact. He wanted all that weight on top of him, needed it crushing him.  

“Found it,” Steve breathed shakily, and then, sweet relief, he was on him, his face in Bucky’s neck, his chest touching his back, one hand on his waist, and the other, the other- the other had fingers greasy with slick and was back on his cleft, slipping lower into that dark hot valley, stroking back and forth. Finding where it was looking for, finding the dry pucker of Bucky’s hole, getting it slippery.

Bucky’s mouth was open into the pillow already. He’d forgotten how incredible this felt, how sensitive it was there. He’d blocked out this whole part of his body, it was too painful, it was so much easier to want someone else than to admit to wanting someone to want him. Not that he’d ever wanted someone else to want him, who wasn’t Steve…

Steve’s finger was stroking round Bucky’s hole in circles, sending spirals of hot pleasure up his spine.

“Jesus, Steve- Jesus, Steve- Jesus fucking Christ-” Bucky panted, lifting his hips involuntarily, grasping his own hair. Steve was going inside him, one slick finger just pushing against his resisting muscles, and then Bucky felt himself yield and heard and felt Steve groan into his shoulder. Bucky sobbed open-mouthed into the pillow, because it felt so good, and he bit into the fabric when Steve’s finger slid in deeper.

“I’m in you, oh my God, Bucky, I’m in you-” Steve was murmuring over and over, sounding shocked, like they were teens again, teens who felt like the first people on earth to discover doing this to each other. “Do you remember this? You remember this. You feel so good, oh Buck, my Buck- I never thought I’d feel this again- Oh my god I’ve missed you-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bucky panted, overwhelmed. He was already so far gone, with Steve’s finger twisting inside him, that he didn’t even care when he cried out wordlessly, didn’t even care how wrecked his voice sounded when he shouted, “I missed you too, God, I’ve missed you so fucking much! This is so fucking good- Fuck, give it to me- Steve-!”

Steve moved his finger more and whimpered into Bucky’s shoulder like he was the one getting fucked, and Bucky was grunting, moving his hips, sweat slipping down his spine. His knees slid on the mattress, parting involuntarily to let more of Steve in. Steve didn’t hesitate, he gave Bucky what he was asking for, sliding in deep and rubbing just perfect, until Bucky stopped remembering to grunt and allowed himself to moan, moan like he hadn’t ever done, like he didn’t know he could, deep and low and unbridled, moan like one of his own needy lays. Then Steve pushed in a second finger and started to fuck him for real.

"You see? You see how it is? You see how I'm never gonna leave you, Buck? I'm gonna stay right here, just like this, 'til the end Buck, I promise..."

“Yes, Steve, fuck, yes-” Bucky cried, lifting his head. And then he realised he needed to be kissing Steve and he reared up, supporting himself with his hand on the wall, and Steve wrapped his arm round his waist to hold him close. Their mouths smashed together, wet and open and panting, Bucky’s neck at an awkward angle, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything, he’d forgotten he was sick, he’d forgotten he was old, he’d forgotten he’d been alone so long, he’d forgotten that he should be ashamed to be so undone like this. Everything was blotted out by the feeling of Steve inside him, where he belonged.

 

*

 

Afterwards they lay passed out in a sweaty tangle. It had gone on for a long long time, real slow and hot, changing rhythm, changing position, ending with Bucky unable to hold himself up anymore, plastered to the mattress while Steve held his hips up and straddled his legs, three fingers inside and so deep, rocking against Bucky so Bucky was convinced for a while that Steve had messed up and got his dick inside after all and was fucking him fully. It felt full enough for it, Steve's three fingers, but Bucky’s mind had been completely white and unable to properly think about it, let alone care, let alone protest. Eventually he’d come from sheer inability to take any more, his cock rubbing raw as it spurted onto the sheet, and collapsing with a groan, shivering, and he was so gone that he didn’t even notice what Steve did with himself.

Rising from the dizzy blankness he blinked and rubbed his eyes, and wiped cooled sweat from his face. The room had got completely dark sometime while they were fucking, or while they’d been lying there. Who knew, who even knew what time it was. He was on his front, lying where he’d collapsed, his come sticky between his stomach and the sheet. Steve was pressed full length against him, up against his left side, with his cheek on his stump.

“Steve. Stevie.” Bucky whispered.

“Mm,” Steve replied, nuzzling into him.

“You didn’t— — did you?”

He felt Steve’s smile against his skin.

“’Course not, Buck, ‘m not as dumb as you seem to think y’know…” He was pretty much asleep, Bucky could tell from his voice. “Came all over your back, though, hope that doesn’t mean I’m gonna die...”

Bucky became aware of a sticky coolness in the dip of his spine, more than just sweaty like it was between his legs and on the backs of his knees, and he laughed.

He laughed even though it really wasn’t something to joke about. Really not funny at all. He felt Steve smile again, sleepy, not really aware of what he was saying. Bucky wondered if Steve was really aware of the gravity of the situation. 

Steve fell asleep quickly, half on top of him. Skin on skin was hot and the night was warm, but Bucky felt cold. He lay feeling cold and scared and separate, with the chill of fear keeping him awake. He squeezed his eyes shut and focused on the ache in his ass and his thighs, the ache that comes after good sex, the ache that Steve had left in him. He tried to forget what he knew, what he feared, and just feel Steve. Steve next to him, the aching trace where Steve had been inside him. Just Steve, just this moment. He had him. They had this. He was here, still here. Oh God, he didn't want to have to leave. Not now. Not yet. 


	6. Chapter 6

_The knobs of Steve’s spine shine in the light from the lamp that hangs above the kitchen table. His skin is so pale it’s almost translucent, whiter and more opaque where it’s stretched taught over the prominent bones. That one just there looks so awful, right at the top, in the middle of his shoulders, jutting way out because Steve’s got his head bent down- awful. Above it Steve’s slender neck disappears into the rough green towel. Bucky looks at his watch, then touches Steve’s shoulder._

_“Alright, that’ll do.”_

_Steve emerges from the towel in a billow of eucalyptus-scented steam. His face is red from the heat of the water in the bowl beneath him- but also from the fever. His eyes are round and glassy, pupils big and dark. Feverish. It’s not broken yet today. His mouth’s open and wet, sucking the fresh air in gratefully. Steve hates doing the steam baths, says they make him claustrophobic and dizzy. But the mentholated steam does ease him some; when he breathes in deeply Bucky can hear his chest rattling with the gunk it has loosened up in there. Steve’s breathing rattles, hitches, and then he starts to cough. His cough is very loud, and grating, and wet, and shakes his whole frame. He claps a red cold hand to his mouth and hunches over it, his other arm holding around his ribs, and Bucky doesn’t blame him, because the cough does seem harsh enough to shake him right apart. Steve puts some effort into it, face turning red, and manages to get something up. He spits it into his handkerchief._

_“Sorry,” he says, and winces, touching the back of his head with his hand. Bucky knows the fever takes Steve that way, making his skin papery and hot so that it hurts for him to be touched, making him feel like his aching bones are trying to escape right out of his body. It makes it so that coughing makes his head ache sharply right there at the top, his skull feeling like an egg being cracked._

_“Hush your messing,” Bucky replies, giving Steve the evil eye. As if he’s going to get offended by a little bit of phlegm like that; as if Bucky hasn’t seen worse things coming out of Steve Rogers’ orifices in his time. Bucky sets his lips and runs a critical eye over Steve. Steve’s sitting there with his mouth open because he can’t breathe through all the crap in his nose, with his eyes all glassy and vacant. His pigeon chest beneath the white vest heaves with the effort of trying to catch his breath. His hands are red, looking raw and ungainly beneath his slender wrists, and his upper arms are mottled with goose-flesh. Poor circulation- heart problems flaring up? Please God not the rheumatic fever again. This is just a cold. Just a bad cold. There’s a flush high up on Steve’s cheekbones. “How’re you feelin’?”_

_“Like I just won the World Series, Buck,” Steve slurs, his eyes still unfocused, looking a little delirious. “Like one million dollars. Like Ginger Rogers just asked me for a dance.”_

_“You little sarcastic punk, you can’t be doin’ too bad, ” Bucky sniffs dismissively, but he can’t mask his worry. “’Sides, don’t pretend with me- I know you prefer Fred.” He pauses, frowns at the way Steve’s holding onto his ribs still, like he’s got a stitch. His breathing is bad. “Want to go to bed?”_

_“Ooh, Mr Barnes, how terribly forward, that’s no way to talk to a lady.” Steve puts on a girlish British accent. Definitely delirious._

_“Yeah, you got me, I find you god damn irresistible when you’ve got a trail of slime comin’ out your beak like that,” Bucky says with a roll of his eyes. The sarcasm is a lie. Bucky always finds Steve irresistible. But he’s not thinking about that now; he just wants Steve to be warm. If he piles some blankets on top of the eiderdown and gets in there with him, maybe he can get him hot enough to sweat that fever out._

_Steve’s dropped the joke and is nodding, agreeing with being put to bed, and that makes Bucky actually worried. Steve normally pretends harder than this, makes a play of resisting Bucky’s care, calling him a mother hen, saying I’m alright really whyn’t you just go on out, Buck, I’m really fine. Not this evening, though. Bucky knows Steve’s nodding because his bones ache and his skin hurts and his lungs burn and his head throbs and his eyes are hot and his throat is like powdered glass, and he can’t breathe properly, and his pulse is erratic and rocking his whole frame, and he feels too weak to barely sit up straight or hold his own head up, and it’s just too much to be able to pretend through._

_So Bucky helps him up and they go to bed. Steve strips straight out of his vest and pants and gets directly under the covers in his underwear. Bucky’s face does something, he knows it does, at the sight of the white elastic stretched over Steve’s hip bones. The bones jut out so far they make a gap between Steve’s pale stomach and the fabric. It’s beautiful- Bucky wants to rest his cheek there and never leave- but it’s awful. It’s awful. Tomorrow he’ll get some greens, and some garlic, and so help him some chicken even if he does gotta steal it, and he’ll get some nourishment into that boy._

_Steve’s lying on his side with his hands up pillowing his head. His mouth is open, distorted where his face is pressed into the pillow. His eyes are shut. His long lashes look a little damp against his flushed cheek. He looks really sick. He looks vulnerable, in a way he very rarely does. Most people tend to look vulnerable with their eyes shut, when they’re sleeping, but not usually Steve. Bucky’ll look over at him in the middle of the night and that little cuss will have a frown on his face and his jaw clenched, probably fists clenched too, probably starting something even in his dreams. Even asleep he’s always so Steve, always so tough. Even when he wakes up first thing in the morning he’s never hazy and dreamy and moony like Bucky is before he gets going, gets some cold water on his head, no, Steve springs awake with his eyes sharp and his wits about him. He’s always so there, so present, so aware of everything, of himself. Always sharp._

_Not this evening. Now that he’s got his head down and he doesn’t have to struggle to be alert and with Bucky anymore, Steve’s gone. He’s not asleep, but he’s riding far away somewhere on his fever, sunk down deep in the sensations in his body, in the pain. His face is so soft. Bucky can see his eyes moving rapidly behind his thick hot eyelids._

_Bucky looks up at the ceiling and puts the heels of both hands into his eyesockets, then runs them round to the back of his head._ Shit shit shit _._

_There’s a war on. Bucky’s going to sign up- he hasn’t told Steve yet. He’s going to enlist because there are no prospects here, and soldiers get paid ok. He can send his pay packets home to Steve and Steve can sock most of it away so that things will be better for them, afterwards. Bucky spends most of his time here now, they’re pretty much living together, now, now Steve’s mom’s gone, and they’re trying to make it work. They’re trying so hard but really they’re still just kids and Steve can’t hold down any employment because of shit like this, because of being sick all the time, and his drawings aren’t bringing anything in yet, and Bucky’s job as a clerk is dead-end and pays next to nothing and makes him so depressed and they are trying for a future together- but it’s not working. They can’t make ends meet. Their lives feel like they’re closing in on them and they’re too damn young for that. So Bucky’s going to make it so that this war will be a blessing for the two of them; it will mean they can have a better life one day. Bucky’s banking on being made an officer- he’s smart as hell and can get people to listen to him, and he’s always been the best pitcher on the block so he bets he’ll be a crack shot- he knows he’ll be good- and if they do then he’ll earn more than he ever could in any job here. He’ll do it for the both of them._

_But, when he goes, there’ll be no-one here to look after Steve. No-one who Steve would allow to care for him, the way he allows Bucky. Even with Bucky he’s reluctant, belligerent, a real pain in the neck of a patient. Without Bucky there, will Steve even admit to himself when he’s sick? Will he take care of himself?_

_Bucky rubs his neck and curses some more, full of anxious thoughts chasing after each other in a circle. His options are too few, and not one of them is good enough. A Catch-22; but in his heart he knows which choice he’s going to make. He just hopes that somehow against the odds the winters will be mild and Steve will be sensible and he will do ok alone._

_Bucky puts the ratty spare blankets on top of Steve and gets out of his own clothes and gets in there, pulling Steve to him and tucking the covers around them tight. Steve, heartbreakingly, makes a little whimper and presses up against Bucky, so soft, so soft. So ill that he’s not even aware of it or ashamed to be like this, how he never is. Well, not never, but very rarely; Bucky can, occasionally, get him this way by making love to him for hours and hours. Love him so long and good that he gets supple and soft and vulnerable and relaxed for once in his scrappy little life, finally able to admit he wants Bucky’s arms around him. Bucky wishes Steve was like this right now because he’d just fucked him mindless, not because his temperature is dangerously high and he’s frightened and in pain. But he’ll take it either way. He loves this so much, having Steve in his arms._

_He holds Steve close and feels his fragile back, the skin hot and parched, and his cold clammy hands, and listens to his shaky breathing and the gurgle of the gunk in his lungs. He holds him tight, as if somehow he can make it last that way. Make it last for years, across oceans. As if his arms could bolster up Steve’s immune system and make him better, and keep him warm, and safe, and loved, ‘til Bucky can come back home to him again._

 

*

 

The irony wasn’t lost on Bucky. He was the one now with the sticking-out bones, requiring extra holes in his belt to keep his jeans on- it was funny to begin with, his trousers suddenly plummeting south because there wasn’t enough of him to keep them up- that was while he was still capable of walking around. His legs got weak enough after a while that it didn’t matter much anymore. When that happened Steve brought him a pair of sweatpants he could wear round the apartment, ones with a drawstring so he could keep them hitched up and get them off easily when he made his slow way from the couch to the bathroom. The mattress was too low down for him to easily get in and out of after a certain point, the point when he stopped being able to walk around outside, and mostly by then he stayed on the couch.

Mostly he stayed on the couch and watched TV. Mostly he tried not to think about the fact that he was dying, but he couldn’t help thinking about how different this felt from looking after Steve, when Steve had been small and sick all the time. That had always felt so urgent- Steve needed to get better because else he’d lose his job; Bucky needed to make some soup and get it in Steve because otherwise he’d get too weak and dehydrated and the cold might turn into something more dangerous; they needed to shift that cough before the cold weather set in for real. Looking after Steve had always had a sense of futurity, optimism balancing on the edge of fear. Sure there’d been more than one time when Bucky had been scared that Steve might die, but death was never in any way inevitable. Death was a freak outlying chance, which Bucky did everything he could to keep at as low an odds as possible. Steve had been sickly, but sickness wasn’t the default. It was always assumed without question that Steve would pull through and recover from whatever ailed him, and he had, every time.

Dying was different. The future receded. Steve talked a lot of nonsense about “when” and “maybe” and “if”, but those words didn’t mean much to Bucky. There was no _when he was better_ , not like there always had been with Steve. There was only watching himself get gradually worse, observing new symptoms and tracking the progress of the old ones. Bucky had no timeframe of his death- he wasn’t waiting for it, but he knew it was coming. He might live years like this, he might have only weeks. It didn’t really matter. It would always be too soon.

Time became soupy and unreal, and that did feel familiar from the 1930s, from some of the bad nights back then. Bucky remembered staying up all through a long winter’s night with Steve, coaxing him through every shallow breath, because if Steve laid down and tried to sleep his lungs would’ve seized up entirely. When you stay up all night unable to presume the next breath is going to come, time loses all meaning. And when the morning arrived and the asthma attack eased, the daylight seemed inappropriate and the time on the clock on the wall a nonsense, unbelievable; it couldn’t really be seven-thirty am, not when just now it had been barely three and each minute had been a torture. They’d survived the night, but the morning- that had seemed like it would never come- was far less real than the lingering atmosphere of being patient and scared in the dark of the night, listening out and praying for Steve’s next breath.

Bucky, dying, now stopped measuring time in terms of minutes and hours, morning and afternoon, day and night. Those weren’t important. He mostly stayed in one place, on the couch, and so the time of day didn’t matter at all. The only thing that broke up time and the only metric he had for it- especially towards the end when he slipped in and out of consciousness far more easily and often, when he lost track of almost everything else- was whether Steve was there or not.

Steve was there: time moved far too quickly, in a blur, slipping away from them, making an afternoon’s long love-making seem like it lasted only half an hour, making them startled at dawn’s arrival because they hadn’t realized they’d stayed up all night talking. When Steve was with him time felt like a betrayal, because they couldn’t get enough of each other, and no amount of it would have been sufficient.

Steve wasn’t there: time slowed to a crawl, reduced to the stilted movement of the second hand. Awareness of time became only endlessly straining to hear the jingle of keys and Steve’s footsteps on the stairs outside, knowing they would come eventually, but not exactly when. It was like listening out for Steve’s next asthmatic breath had been- an agony of seconds that seemed like they’d never resolve themselves into the event so longed for: a juddering inhalation, or Steve finally coming through the door. When Steve was gone Bucky’s wide-wandering, long, long life dwindled down to this silent apartment and a blanket and a pillow on the couch, and the tick of the clock, and waiting.

In the beginning, Steve did leave him alone a lot. He was out being busy, going to the hospital, to the drugstore, to go get groceries. He did a lot of things he thought might help, on the off chance they would, like bringing a doctor to look at Bucky or making him eat a lot of oranges. They could afford those kinds of things that Bucky would have killed to have been able to provide Steve with, back when they were young and poor- like food with nutritional value and proper medical care- and it was another bitter irony that now they could have had anything, there was precisely nothing that could have done any good.

 

When the doctor came he frowned and hmm-ed a lot, and spent a lot of time listening to Bucky’s chest with a stethoscope and palpating his abdomen, to cover over the fact that he had absolutely no idea what to do.

When he left, giving Bucky a clasp on the shoulder and a close-lipped, pitying smile, he’d gestured to Steve to follow him out of the front door. Steve glanced at Bucky, who was sitting on the edge of the couch looking out the window chewing his lip, lost in thought. Steve nodded and slipped out the door after the doctor, pulling it shut behind him and leaving his hand on the handle.

“Well, what do you think, doc? Something you didn’t want him to hear?” Steve asked, anxious. At this point he still had a lot of faith in doctors and hospitals, despite what Bucky had told him about the lack of research, the lack of interest that the medical industry had in curing the gay cancer. This was the _future_ , there was such a thing as _progress._ Surely it couldn’t really be completely hopeless.

“Mr. Rogers, ah- _Captain_ Rogers, sir,” the doctor began, wringing his hands a little cringingly. He knew exactly who Steve was and throughout the appointment had been valiantly suppressing his surprise at the fact that the real live Captain America was living in a shabby apartment in a down-and-out part of Brooklyn, evidently- well, evidently _involved_ with one of _those_ types of men. “The thing you must understand is that this disease isn’t strictly a disease as you may comprehend it. It’s more, ah, useful to think of it as- as a syndrome, which has many, wide-ranging potential effects- that we do not fully understand at this juncture, I hasten to add- and this makes it exceptionally difficult, on a case-by-case basis, to make a prognosis or indeed to- ah- suggest appropriate treatment...”

“Cut to the chase, doctor.” Steve pressed, nostrils flaring. He had no patience for this kind of dodging around the point. “Can you help Bucky, or not?”

“Yes, yes, of course, my apologies. I, ah- in, ah, Mr. _Barnes’s_ case I’m afraid the symptoms do not align with any of the models we have developed for this, ah, _syndrome_ \- and those are, you understand, themselves only very cursory, and incomplete- even within them there are very few treatment options, and those that do exist are still in the experimental stage- it is most unfortunate that there does not exist adequate funding to enable us to gain a greater understanding of the affliction… But, my apologies, I digress… As I was saying, in Mr Barnes’ case, I am deeply regretful to have to tell you, it would seem that there is very little that anyone will be able to do. In fact, I must go so far as to say, though it pains me, that I believe that there is nothing at all that can be done for Mr Barnes.” The doctor was timid and had poor people skills, but he was kind and genuinely invested in the AIDS crisis, and his regret at his lack of knowledge and inability to help was genuine. “I can of course provide prescriptions for palliative drugs, as they are required- morphine- anti-emetics- anything to make Mr. Barnes more comfortable, as his symptoms progress…”

His voice trailed off, on account of the look on Steve’s face. Steve’s eyes were electric and his distress was palpable.

“There’s nothing you can do?” He demanded, not aware that he looked like he was willing to beat the doctor up if that meant he would tell Steve there was some hope.

“I’m afraid not. I am truly sorry, Captain Rogers.”

Steve closed his eyes and breathed in deeply a few times. When he returned his eyes to the doctor’s, his look was straight out of Brooklyn, 1939- Bucky would have groaned at the sight of it, because that look always foretold trouble. It was the look of a 90-lb asthmatic willing to lie on his enlistment form because he wanted to fight the good fight. It was the look of a soldier happy to defy his superior officer in order to launch a crazy rescue mission across enemy lines. It was the look of a man who hadn’t hesitated to sacrifice himself in order to save the world. It was the look of Steve Rogers, who throughout all his long life would always have done anything- _anything_ \- for one James Buchanan Barnes.

“You say you don’t know how to treat people like Bucky because no-one’s doing the research? There’s no funding for it?”

“I- ah- yes, that is a major obstacle preventing progress being made in tackling the epidemic, yes-”

“Who’s responsible for medical research funding in this country? Wait, never mind. I _know_ which _fucker_ is responsible for this. And I know how to get to him, you see if I don’t, doc, lord, they wanted me to work for them, well they’ll see what terms I demand, they’ll see what kind of hell I’ll raise if they won’t help fix this…” Steve was talking to himself, his eyes narrowed, and he actually slapped his fist into his open palm as a plan evidently crystalized in his mind. The doctor shuffled his feet a little, uncomfortably. He had no idea what Steve was talking about.

“I- um- ah, well. Well, Captain Rogers, it has been an honor to meet you. Please don’t hesitate to contact me about those prescriptions I mentioned or if you have any questions, and I sincerely wish all the best to yourself, and Mr. Barnes…”

“Thank you doc, thank you, yeah, it’s been great talking to you…” Steve said vaguely, and pumped the doctor’s hand absent-mindedly, evidently caught up in his plan and barely aware of what the doctor was saying. The doctor smiled nervously and lifted his hat before he made his escape and trotted off down the stairs, leaving Steve standing by the door staring into space, with his fists clenched and that look of zealous determination painted on his features.

 

*

“Steve…”

“And so they told me I could ask for anything I wanted, right?” Steve was saying, pacing around the living room, gesticulating enthusiastically. “And they- ha- they thought I’d be after, y’know, a house on Nantucket and a speedboat or something. These people, Bucky, you have no idea. You could tell they were actually shocked when I said I didn’t want anything at all, it was literally inconceivable to them that anyone could turn down wealth like that-”

“Steve-”

“-And I don’t know what exactly it is they want from me, it’s all military secrets of course, but you know what Bucky, I think this can _work,_ I think I have enough bargaining power to get them to agree to it. They want me _bad_ , they made that pretty clear. And also, another thing, I’ve been thinking of making our story public, like nationally? What do you think, would you be ok with that? Becoming a symbol? To help with the stigma, y’know-”

“STEVE.”

“What?” Steve replied, giving a little start. He hadn’t really heard Bucky trying to get through to him, he’d been monologuing with his eyes alight with purpose and enthusiasm, brain far away from this apartment, from this reality. Now, interrupted, he threw a glance at Bucky. Bucky was sitting back on the couch looking thin and tired, but not too shabby considering- it was a good day. He looked very fine in his white vest and gray track pants, Steve thought, his stubble adding drama to his face, that had become even more striking since he started losing so much weight, those cheekbones sharper than ever and his blue eyes dazzling in their deep sockets. Bucky looked fine, but nonetheless he still looked ill, and he looked unhappy. He sighed and tossed his head, annoyed at Steve and reluctant to voice what he wanted to say, now that he actually had Steve’s attention. He rubbed at his eye discontentedly.

“What is it?” Steve asked, concerned.

“Steve, I- you can’t.” Bucky frowned and gritted his teeth, and then continued, in a defeated voice. “You can’t go to D.C.”

Steve looked at Bucky. Bucky looked back. Steve raised his hand with a frown, like, _what are you talking about_?

Jesus Christ, Bucky thought, Steve could be dense sometimes.

“You can’t go to D.C., Steve.” He repeated, and he put the emphasis on ‘ _can’t’_ , hoping Steve would understand without him having to spell it out. Steve just carried on looking at him like a plank of wood. Bucky sighed again and looked out of the window, turning his face away.

“Why not?”

Too much.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ, Steve,” Bucky exploded, “are you a fucking idiot? You need me to make it clear to you? How much clearer can it fucking _be_ \- Look at me! Look at me!” He’d been shouting with his hand upraised, and now he waved it in front of his torso, and plucked at the baggy waistband of his sweats. “You think you’ve got time? You think I’m- Jesus Christ I can’t believe I’m saying this- you think, you really think- Steve, Christ, help me out here- You think I can- You think I’m gonna-”

_Make it. Survive. Be able to cope with you being gone. Hold out until you get back._

Bucky inhaled deeply and closed his eyes, reigning himself in, before he continued, more calmly, “Steve. Look. I know you’re excited about this plan- I am too. It’s great, Steve. I’m so proud of you. But you can’t go, not now. I know you don’t want to admit it- don’t interrupt me. You don’t want to admit it. You think that if you go, and you get them to do something about the epidemic, and they start researching it properly, then there’ll be some miracle cure and I’ll get better. Ok, deny it, but I know it’s true. You don’t want to admit what’s staring you in the face.”

“Bucky-” Steve attempted, reaching out, eyes gone heartbroken.

“Hush. Listen to me. This is _happening,_ Steve. This is happening, whether you like it or not. And I’m not-” Bucky had been so brave, but here his voice cracked and tears spilled onto his cheeks, that he fiercely swiped away, “I’m _not gonna make it_. And if you go, Steve, if you go away…” His voice tapered into a hoarse whisper. “You want to go, baby? You want to leave me behind? You’re sure I’ll still be here when you get back, huh? How do you know it won’t be too late?”

“Oh, Bucky…” Steve answered, and he took two big steps across the living room straight onto the couch, and swept Bucky up in his arms. Bucky went rigid, because a lifetime of being self-sufficient doesn’t die easily, but then he let his spine soften, and he let Steve haul him into his lap- these days he was so much slighter, these days he didn’t object to anything Steve wanted to do to him, to being held and manhandled. These days he had far more to lose from being proud than he did from being vulnerable. Bucky put his hand in Steve’s hair as Steve bent his forehead to his mangled shoulder and tightened his arms round his back.

“Bucky, Bucky-” Steve whispered, clinging to him. He didn’t know what to say. Bucky was right. He’d been hiding from what was happening, he’d been caught up in his plans. He’d of course known that Bucky was worsening, he would have to have been truly in denial to not see how thin and weak he was becoming, but the way Bucky was talking- it wasn’t like Steve planned to go away for months; he thought it would only be a few weeks at most- but then he realized that actually he had no idea how long what he wanted to do would take, and no idea of a practical course of action- what was he going to do, just catch a plane to D.C. and waltz up and knock on the front door of the White House and demand to see Ronald Reagan immediately?- and that made him realize the plan wasn’t actually a plan. It was a fantasy. It was an escape route. He’d been filling his head with it, because he didn’t want to think about what was happening here at home. He was Captain America, he was Steve Rogers, he would always fight as long and hard as he could, he would always _try_. He didn’t want to accept that there might really be nothing left that he could do. He didn’t want to acknowledge that they might really only have weeks left.

Steve held Bucky and Bucky stroked Steve’s head, and Steve thought about it. It had been days and days since Bucky had left the apartment, and Steve suddenly realized that that probably meant that Bucky would never leave the apartment, ever again. Those days were over. There wouldn’t ever come a spring day when Bucky would step outside and see the green leaves, the sickness and the winter behind him. His life was compacted down into the days and weeks of this, his last fall, and the coming winter, and this small apartment, the four walls of the living room, and the couch, and Steve. This was it. The end was coming. There was nothing Steve could do to stop it.

Grief swallowed Steve’s heart whole.

 

*

 

Steve didn’t go to D.C. They had a good few weeks, in which Steve more than once regretted not going on his trip- because Bucky was up and lively and for hours at a time they could feel like nothing was wrong. They could talk curled up on the couch for hours, or make love in the morning- so careful, but so desperate for each other, or sit at the table and play cards. For hours at a time it felt like a heaven made just for the two of them, like they’d been granted a reprieve. But then Bucky would get tired and absent and have to lie down, or else he’d go grey and Steve would run and grab a bowl for him to puke into, and dread would fill Steve’s chest up again.

And then Bucky took a turn for the worse. Steve moved the mattress from the bedroom to the living room, beside the couch that had become Bucky’s sickbed, so he could lie beside him. They held hands while Bucky slipped in and out of sleep, Steve’s reaching up and Bucky’s hanging down. They lay like that while the autumnal sunlight moved steadily across the room in the shortening afternoons, or when days of rain cast everything in cold grey light and pattered at the windows.

Steve didn’t go out and leave Bucky alone anymore, not any more than he absolutely had to: running through the rain across the street to get food and supplies from that bodega. He made soups, and fruit salads, that Bucky could only pick at. Steve got the prescriptions filled; the anti-emetics helped some. But Bucky was getting thinner and thinner anyway, and he stayed on the couch all the time now, and the days were melting into each other while the nights stretched out unfathomably, as Bucky gradually dwindled. 

 

*

It was one lowering late afternoon in November when Bucky unstuck his parched lips and whispered,

“Stevie,”

Steve instantly jumped up from his half-sleep on the mattress, and crouched by Bucky’s head, smoothing his lank hair back. “I’m here, I’m here. What do you need?”

“Wanna get down there with you.”

Steve swallowed hard. He knew what this meant. He’d been preparing for it for the last three days.

Three days ago Bucky had said that he knew the end was near. He wanted Steve to know he knew he was going, and he wanted to say goodbye while he was still lucid. Steve had almost sworn at him for that, because how could they begin to know how to say goodbye? They’d spent weeks, months now, doing nothing but saying goodbye. There was no way there could be ever enough to time to ever finish saying it. The first time around, of course, they hadn’t got to say it, and now that they had the time and could prepare, they found the task impossible.

Bucky had seemed to want a sense of occasion. He’d held Steve’s hand and told him to be brave, while tears poured over Steve’s cheeks. He’d thanked Steve for coming back. Steve had sobbed with his mouth open. Bucky let Steve scream and wail into his chest, and then he’d made Steve promise to help him down on to the mattress when he asked, so they could be close together when the time came.

It had come now.

Steve realized why Bucky had chosen to make a proper goodbye, make it clear what was happening, and make Steve cry so hard. It was so they could be in this moment with some calm, now. Steve felt hollow. He’d let some of it out, so he could do this.

He helped Bucky down. Bucky’s body felt so light. He smelled of sickness, and of Bucky.

They shared one pillow, their foreheads touching. The room got dark. Outside, the streetlights blinked on. Beyond their glow the night was dark blue. Steve and Bucky looked at each other in that suffused orange light. Deep in their sunken sockets, Bucky’s eyes shone. For a moment he was there- much more there than he had been for days, days spent in an opiated haze. They looked at each other in silence. Then pain wracked Bucky’s face and his eyes closed.

Steve stayed awake all night long, and Bucky flickered in and out, and every time his eyes opened he found Steve right there beside him.

He swam into consciousness at one point and thought there’d been a miracle, because he’d been wandering somewhere in Baltimore in 1968, a time when Steve had been long gone and he’d often struggled to remember his face. He smiled hugely- making Steve, despite himself and wondering why, smile back- and prayed it wasn’t a dream, and then he slipped back under.

Bucky surfaced again and was shocked to see Steve’s face so strange and big, because he thought it was December 1941, the time of Pearl Harbor, when Steve’s rheumatic fever had come back. He was keeping watch, he was waiting for something, he was awake in the middle of the night- so someone was sick; it must’ve been Steve, but no, Steve was big, so it couldn’t be Steve who was sick. Maybe it was the War then, and they were wakened because of an air raid or shelling, or it was his turn to be lookout. Maybe that’s why he felt so scared and full of dreadful anticipation. But Steve was there, so nothing too bad could really happen. Steve was there, and he didn’t fight or question it, he just tried to keep his eyes open as long as he could, and just absorb Steve’s dear face.

Towards dawn, when the sky outside started turning grey, Bucky closed his eyes for a final time. His shallow breaths became spaced out and slow. He felt Steve put his arms around him, and kiss him one last time. Once they’d had a first kiss, and now they had a last kiss. Wasn’t life strange. Two last kisses- they hadn’t known it the first time. And a second first kiss, too- Steve in the apartment, in the summer, in the night, like a gift.

Time meant nothing to him now. The only things he knew were Steve’s arms, Steve’s lips- they didn’t feel big or small, they didn’t feel real or like a memory. He didn’t know what year it was. Steve close to him was his entire world, his past and his present and his fantasy. Steve was the last thing left, the last thing to leave him, as all of everything faded away.

Steve wasn’t sure when exactly it happened, but at some point in the early morning, he realised Bucky was gone.

 


	7. Chapter 7

_One year & eleven months later_

_October, 1984_

_Brighton, England_

 

Brighton in October was a bleak place, suffering from typical English seaside weather, damp and chilly. The tourist season was long over and the town seemed to have shut its eyes for the winter, drawing into itself, shrinking from the sick clinging fog that rolled in off the sea and eerily shrouded the skeleton of the old burnt-out pier, and distorted the lights and fairground music of the new pier into an uncanny nightmare.

The hotel stood a few streets back from the seafront- large, old and ugly. It was filled not with tourists, as it would have been a few months back, but with politicians. For a week it was the host of the Conservative Party conference for 1984. Its out-modishly decorated rooms and hallways were filled with bodies in the broad-shouldered suits, large square spectacles and comb-overs (or perms) that were the uniform of the British political classes of the nineteen-eighties. Its ballroom served as the oratory for the Conservative party’s elite. Its walls echoed with well-bred voices and the hearty laughs of immoral men, and the otherworldly squeal of fax machines.

It was the night before the 12th of October. In the morning, the leader of the Conservative party and the Prime Minister of Great Britain was to make her flagship address to her party. Margaret Thatcher worked late; it was in fact already the early morning of the 12th, and she was still at her desk in her suite, immaculately made-up and attired in battle-dress of shoulder-pads and pearls, putting the finishing touches to her speech.

The small alarm clock beside her elbow ticked round to 2.54am, when the bomb went off.

She was knocked from her seat by the impact of the blast. The entire hotel rocked as if struck by an earthquake. Bits of plaster and dust rained from the high ceiling, the light fittings shook and tinkled. She heard, distantly, through ringing ears, sounds of smashing, screams. Fire alarms started wailing throughout the building. As far as she could tell nothing was on fire in this room, and the ceiling did not seem to be about to cave in. She lay sensibly where she had fallen, beneath the chair, anticipating another explosion. Plaster dust settled in her orange hair.

From the bedroom adjoining the sitting room of the suite, Mrs Thatcher heard her husband, who had been sleeping soundly, in silk pyjamas, bellow: “What in the devil’s name was that?!”

“Don’t be an ass, Denis,” she replied, perfectly calmly. “Quite clearly it was a bomb. Someone has attempted to assassinate me.”

“By God, woman. Are you alright?”

“Evidently,” Thatcher said drily, and waited for her security services to come and escort her to safety.

 

*

 

_Early 1983_

_Washington D.C., USA_

 

“Mr. Rogers, the President will see you now.” The young secretary’s voice fell dully in the deadening acoustics of the plush room. Steve tried not to show his relief on his face as she held the door open for him, offering a glimpse of corridor and space beyond, but his chest swelled with it. They were somewhere deep in the bowels of the White House; the room had no windows, and Steve had begun to choke with claustrophobia not long into his wait, weighed down by the shining polished wood and the dense drapery, the thick luxurious carpets. He’d been sitting in this chair holding onto the rim of his shield, counting his breaths and beginning to doubt if the secretary would ever come back, if he should venture out and see if he’d been forgotten, when finally he’d heard the click of her heels coming towards the door.

The secretary looked at Steve blandly. Steve was sure she had been instructed to refer to him as _Mr_. rather than by his proper title, and that it was meant to belittle him, put him on the defensive. That’s why he’d been made to wait so long, too. He was being firmly put in his place. As if any of it mattered- as if the title of Captain meant anything to him any more. He almost laughed to himself at the transparency of Reagan, at how badly the President misunderstood him.

Yes, the wait had shaken him, but not in the way that Reagan would have wanted it to: the quivering of a subordinate under the displeased eye of his superior. No likelihood of that, but regardless Steve was uneasy, scared of how little control he had over himself. His anxiety had filled him like dark pitch almost as soon as the door had closed on him. He was almost overwhelmed by the importance of what he needed to achieve that day, the pressure of his duty, his terror of failure. It constricted his chest and made him all too aware of how little of himself there was left to hold everything together. What he had to do was vital, and he wasn’t sure he was strong enough for the task.

“Thank you, miss,” he managed to smile, standing up and mounting his shield resolutely on his arm. The secretary didn’t smile back.

“Follow me, please.”

He did, padding over more plush blue carpets, down over-heated brightly lit windowless corridors forming a labyrinth leading deeper and deeper into the heart of power. They turned on to a wider corridor floored with sparkling parquet that drew the eye down to the double doors at its end, where the president lay in wait. Steve and the secretary made their way past a line-up of portraits of this building’s former residents, each of them seeming to scrutinize Steve. Some he felt were friendly, some hostile, others merely impassive. There were seven more presidents lining the corridor than there should have been, men Steve had trouble keeping the names of straight in his head. He met Roosevelt’s eye and felt, yet again, as he did over and over every day- still- the sickeningly swift passing of his lost time.

In his chest the weight of doubt and worry (and grief, always grief) grew heavier, and heavier and heavier as they approached the double doors. And then he was being let into the Oval Office, and the ravaged face of the 40th President of the United States was bearing down upon him for the second time in his life. Steve saluted, sticking to form. Unwise to open with an overt show of insubordination, however much he wanted to. Besides, being a soldier was what he knew how to do. He could be Captain America here, let that guide him, let it be what it always had been: a shield, a carapace, a strategy.

Reagan chuckled at the salute. His smile was designed to broadcast kindliness. He was avuncular. He was totally menacing.

“At ease, soldier.”

“Thank you, sir.” Steve adopted Captain America’s modified at-ease stance, feet shoulder-width apart, clasping the rim of his shield in both hands. It rested familiarly between his feet, reaching almost to his waist. “I appreciate you agreeing to meet with me today.”

Reagan’s eyes lingered on the shield for a long moment, before he turned and went back to his seat behind his desk, saying over his shoulder, “Sit down, Rogers.”

“Thank you, sir.” Steve repeated. He sat down straight-backed, tilting his strong chin to look down his nose and meet Reagan’s tiny watery eyes.

“So, young man,” Reagan began.

 _You’re barely older than me, you jumped-up motherfucker_ , Steve thought. His vicious hatred of the man in front of him was beginning to burn the back of his throat. Good- it would quell the anxiety, give might to his grief. He could do this. He could beat Reagan. He would win.

“It’s come to my attention you’ve taken it upon yourself to question the allocation of healthcare spending in this country. You’ve been very… vocal.” Reagan pursed his lips disapprovingly, drew a small pile of newspapers towards him across the desk and made a show of studying the front pages, flicking through them. D.C.’s bright early spring sunshine fell onto the desk from the curving window behind him, making his shadow stretch over the newspapers and shining expanse of desk towards Steve. “' _Captain America invites President Reagan to funeral of AIDS victim gay lover_ ’, ‘ _Captain America leads candlelit vigil for AIDS victims’_. ‘ _Captain America organizes sit-in in New York hospital, demands healthcare access for the HIV+’._

Pride flared in Steve’s chest. He’d done what he’d said he would: he’d gone public, made a noise, made the news, touched the nation. And all in pursuit of this day, this one chance, and he’d finally gotten here. He felt at the end of his strength from struggling on despite, despite the- the weight- the loss- the absence- but it was worth it, because he’d made it here, and he could get the payoff at last. He could win.

“And then the television appearance.” Reagan continued, placing the newspapers down, smoothing them with a puffy liver-marked hand. He frowned at Steve- concerned, paternal, but with an ill-concealed distaste. “An address to the nation, you called it. Addressing _me_ directly. Making accusations. Terribly _ill-informed_ accusations. On national television. I wonder what compelled you to embarrass yourself in that way. That’s why I invited you here today, so I can help… set you right. On any misconceptions you may be having.” Reagan smiled his shiny false smile full of shiny false teeth.

“You didn’t respond to my letters. Going on TV seemed about the only way I could get your attention.”

“I’m a busy man. I can’t personally waste my precious time on every rabble-rouser who thinks they have a right to dictate what happens in this country. You have to earn the right to that, Rogers, through democratic elections. You have to have a _mandate._ Do you have a mandate?”

Steve didn’t respond to this unsubtle patronization.

“No. You don’t.” Reagan continued. He’d say what he was going to say regardless of what Steve did or didn’t respond, Steve could tell. “If you recall I generously offered you the chance to serve your country again in the way best suited to you- as a soldier- and was met with truculence, ingratitude. You seemed to forget that it was the US government who created you… Trained you… Resurrected you. I expected great things, Rogers. You’ve been a hero to me since I was a boy, and I was extremely excited to meet my hero in the flesh. I have to say, you’ve been a terrible disappointment.”

 _That’s supposed to hurt my feelings?_ Steve thought. _I’d rather die than be your hero._ Out loud he said:

“I joined the US Army to fight a war, sir, a war against evil. I don’t see any war that needs me to help fight it, in this day and age, other than battles that should be fought right here at home. There’s enough evil at work in our own country, it seems to me, and that’s where I should be serving.”

Reagan did not seem to notice that Steve was a sliver of plausible deniability away from directly accusing Reagan and his administration of being evil, or if he did notice he didn’t seem to care.

“You are aware of the Cold War, aren’t you? It’s been going on a long time, maybe no-one has-”

“Yes, I’m aware, sir. Of course.”

“Well then. You don’t think the USSR is a force of evil? You don’t think these communist scum aren’t just as bad as the Nazis? They’re threatening our Nation’s freedom! They’re threatening the very fabric of democracy! You weren’t around for the Bay of Pigs, Rogers, you don’t know what these _filthy_ \- commie- _bastards_ are-” Reagan almost choked on his indignation, and then interrupted himself, pulled himself together, smoothed his tie. “Ahem. What I’m trying to say is that perhaps you’ve been _misinformed._ A great man like you, a great soldier, a _patriot_ , a defender of freedom, surely you must want to _crush them like beetles under your boot?_ ” Reagan spat, turning purple.

Steve repressed his urge to physically recoil.

“With respect sir, that’s why I’ve come to see you here today. I want to offer you my service.”

This seemed to wrong-foot Reagan. He blinked at Steve. Steve continued:

“As you would’ve read in my letters, I am willing to rejoin the US Army and serve however best my superiors decide. If that’s in some way associated with the Cold War, so be it. I will be the USA’s supersoldier again. I will serve. On one condition. You will publically acknowledge the AIDS crisis, and allocate state funding to treat HIV, and towards research into finding a cure. Those are my terms.”

Reagan’s eyes shifted in his face. “You think you can tell me what to do, boy? Who do you think you are?” He said, in a tone that he obviously expected to strike fear into the hearts of all who heard it.

“My only intent is negotiating a bargain we can both find mutually agreeable. Sir.” Steve replied, steely.

“ _Mutually agreeable.”_ Reagan sneered. “Don’t make me laugh.” His face clouded, the veneer of affability slipping off to reveal open anger and disgust. He stood up suddenly and leaned over the desk to point his finger at Steve. “You listen to me. You think you can waltz into this office and have any kind of bargaining power here? A man like _you?_ You’re a disgrace to your country, Rogers. Publicly associating with those _people_ \- publicly admitting to being a- to being one of _them?”_ Reagan made a sound like he had a foul taste in his mouth. “Going on television, wearing that shield as if you have any right to represent your country now, spouting this nonsense, this vile filth. _You’re nothing but a filthy pinko faggot_. You’re _nothing_. The SSR must have been desperate to choose a man like _you_ for Project Rebirth. And they paid for it in the end, didn’t they? They must have regretted it when you took the coward’s way out. Oh yes, I’ve read the files. You’re happy to be known as a hero, a martyr, but I know the _real_ reason you ended up crashing that plane; I know all about Sergeant Barnes-”

“Don’t you dare bring him into this,” Steve interrupted thunderously. Two pinpoints of heat appeared on his cheekbones. Hearing _his_ name coming out of Reagan’s mouth was unbearable. All that threatened to crush Steve was only being kept back by force of will, and he hadn’t much of that left, and he had to use all of it to try and win this situation that felt horribly like it was slipping out of his control. If the President made him think too much of- of _him,_ Steve didn’t know if he could keep on going. Didn’t know if he could even keep on sitting up straight and look Reagan in the eye.

“ _Don’t tell me what to do, I’m the President of the United States of goddamn America_!” Reagan roared, and banged his fist on the table. “You’ve already brought him into it yourself- publicly announcing your illicit relationship with a fellow US soldier! It beggars belief! It’s despicable! The US Army does not tolerate sodomy, Rogers. I will not knowingly permit a sodomite to besmirch the ranks of our great military. Not on your life. ” Reagan paused to breathe, ran a handkerchief over his sweating forehead. “As for your “conditions”, your demands- you must be out of your mind. There’s no way in hell I will waste this country’s honest tax payers’ money on a disease of faggots and n*****s. God abhors degeneracy, Rogers, and He enacts retribution. Maybe if you people decided to behave like men and stopped buggering each other up the behind, you wouldn’t be dying of that disgusting disease. Just a suggestion.”

Steve went very cold, though his cheeks still burned. It had gone wrong. It had all gone horribly, horribly wrong. He heard Reagan as if from a great distance. All of his consciousness was on that place in his chest that had caved in months- hell, decades- ago, and that was crumbling further now, now not just with heartbreak but also with a hopelessness he’d been trying so very very hard these long months to keep away. He tried one last time. He was Steve Rogers- he would always try. He’d always go down fighting.

“You’re wrong, and you’re making a mistake.” He tried to keep the emotion from his voice, but it felt like it was seeping out anyway. “I’m the greatest soldier this country has ever seen. I can win your war for you. We can work together. Consider my terms. You won’t regret it. Please.” Begging stuck in Steve’s throat, made him feel sick. But he had to do it. He had to do it for Bucky.

Reagan eyed Steve coldly. He looked like he wanted to spit on him.

“Get out of my sight,” he said, and sat back down behind the presidential desk with an air of finality. “Leave and don’t ever let me see your face again. If you speak out about this, if you even say one word about me publicly again, I will have you arrested, and I will have you and your _Sergeant Barnes,_ your _Bucky,_ publicly disgraced. I will have the history books altered to tell of your sickness, your disobedience, your anti-patriotic conduct. I will make sure posterity knows you for the scum you both were. This is what happens when you turn me down, Rogers. I don’t offer second chances. You had your chance and you blew it. You should have been grateful, you should have been proud to serve your country, you should have been proud to serve _me_. I saved your life. Now I know I should’ve left you in that iceberg to rot. You’ve made a very powerful enemy, Rogers. I’ll be keeping my eye on you. Be warned. Now get out.”

Steve stood. While Reagan had been ranting on he’d managed to suppress the burst of emotion that had wobbled his voice and threatened to overwhelm his self-control. Everything felt far away again, or underwater. Maybe this was shock. Rage and despair chilled him deep inside, but they were a long way away too, not really tangible. He’d failed. He’d failed. It rang in his head and bounced its way down his empty chest to his hollow stomach. He’d failed. His voice was even and dead and something he barely recognized when he replied, rashly, propelled by his subterranean rage and bypassing conscious decision:

“It’s you who’s made an enemy, sir. You’ll live to regret this.”

“Are you threatening me?” Reagan blustered. “I’ll call security, I’ll have you arrested, I’ll-”

“That won’t be necessary. I’m leaving now.” Steve turned to go, then paused as he lifted his shield and went to put it on his arm, a jarring interruption in the familiar smooth gesture. He held the shield in front of him awkwardly, an object that had used to feel like part of his own body. He looked at it like he was seeing it for the first time, and then he said quietly, almost to himself: “You can take this back. I guess it’s government property, after all. I won’t be wanting it any more.”

And Steve placed his shield on the broad desk and pushed it towards Reagan. Then he turned and marched away without a backward glance. Abandoned, the shield lay in front of the President on his desk, shining just as brightly as ever, as Steve left it and everything it represented behind him.

 

*

_1983_

_Brooklyn, NYC_

 

Steve spent the weeks after his altercation with Reagan in a fog of pain. Every morning he woke up in agony, spent the day trying to crawl some distance away from it, and went to bed inevitably still in its clutches. The numb rage that had propelled him to surrender his shield had stopped protecting him almost as soon as he left the White House, and by the time he got home to Brooklyn the next day it was replaced by a yawning pit of despair. Sleep was no reprieve. He dreamed of Bucky almost every night, all night long: dreams in which Bucky walked out of a crowd and smiled at Steve and opened his arms, dreams where he was walking away and wouldn’t turn however much Steve called for him, dreams where he fell, over and over while Steve could only watch, frozen, unable to move. He didn’t know which ones were worse, the nightmares of Bucky dying, or the good dreams, where he was alive. The latter, probably, because the fraction of a second upon waking where he thought they were real only made the onslaught of reality, the up-springing of grief, that much more difficult to bear.

It hadn’t gotten any easier all winter, through Christmas and the New Year, into 1983. His grief only seemed to be deepening, finding new angles and new depths. And now it was worse, much worse, because he had failed Bucky yet again.

He didn’t know what to do. The only thing he had been able to think of, the only idea he could commit his mind to and distract himself with, was his plan. It was the only way Steve thought he could redeem himself, make his resurrection mean something. He had to do it, to say sorry to Bucky, to avenge him- and if he could, save other people when he hadn’t been able to save him. But it had all failed.

Steve resented himself almost as much as he hated Reagan. He tortured himself with what-ifs, regretting every decision in his life that had led him to this point. He’d thought he’d done the right thing by speaking up and trying to raise awareness, trying to shame and pressurize Reagan on the public stage, but maybe that had been stupid- he should have found a way to wheedle his way into Reagan’s good books, been more diplomatic, played the long game. It was irrelevant now. It was all over, it was all too late. Everything, everything, far too late.

He spent his days on the sofa, staring down at the mattress which still lay on the living room floor, staring at the place where Bucky had died. Sometimes he went and lay down there, on the very spot. He knew it was unhealthy, ridiculous, but his whole body cried out in agony for want of Bucky, and this felt the tiniest bit like being closer to him. He wasn’t interested in coping healthily. He felt that if he burrowed into his grief he was justly punishing himself, and besides- his grief was all he had left of his love. He clung to it.

He replayed Bucky’s dying days in his mind over and over, staring sightlessly in front of him. And he dwelled on the last time Bucky had died, the last time he had had to grieve him. Steve couldn’t help feeling envious of his former self, knowing in hindsight that _his_ grief was only temporary.

He talked out loud to Bucky often. He asked him to forgive him, asked him what he should do. He told him things, things he’d wished he’d shared when he had the chance to.

“… And then I went back to that pub, do you remember? Where we became the Howling Commandos… I went back; it was one of the few places that had a trace of you that I could still go to. And it was all wrecked. London was burning, it felt like the end of the world. It was the end of the world, for me.” He paused. He looked around the apartment, where he could see Bucky missing from every inch of carpet, every cubic centimeter of air- Steve could see him sprawled on his stomach playing with tin cars as a child, in the kitchen with his mother, walking down the hallway- teenaged and horny and reckless- throwing a glance over his shoulder for Steve to follow him to bed. Leaning against the kitchen doorway, with one arm and grey in his hair and no top on. Dying on the couch, wasted and stinking, his mouth open with pain. Was it worse to be here surrounded by ghosts, or had it been worse to mourn him in Europe, far from home, with nowhere he could go to feel close to him?

“And,” Steve said, starting to cry, “I swore to Peggy, there in that pub, that I’d eradicate Hydra from the planet. So-” here Steve crooked a smile despite his pain, because he’d been so young and goddamned heroic, and it had happened so long ago, “-I went to Switzerland and rode my ridiculous pimped out motorbike all alone directly into the last Hydra base left on the map, to avenge you. It was so dramatic— you should’ve seen it, Buck. You would have laughed your ass off and called me an idiot. Oh, I longed for you to look at me that way you used to, the way that saw through all the Captain America crap, for you to laugh at me and call me dick for brains. I would have given anything…” He paused, his heart beating against his ribcage like an abandoned dog at a gate, like it wanted to jump out and go and find him, or just stop, because it couldn’t bear to beat on with the knowledge that Bucky was nowhere any more.

“And so then I got on that plane and defeated Schmidt and the world was safe, it wasn’t the end after all. But I knew I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, not without— There was nothing left for me, anywhere. So, I decided. Peggy was begging me not to on the radio, but I felt it… I knew it was time. I was happy, Buck, I was so happy to die and know it was to save the world, I was so happy I could finally join you. But I was scared, too, I was so scared… Bucky all I could think of was how you must’ve felt when you were falling, how you must have felt just what I was feeling at that moment only so much worse, how scared you must’ve been…. I was going down and the ground was rushing up to meet me so quickly and I was thinking _I love you I love you I love you I love you_ so it would be my last thought before— before— Oh god how I love you, Bucky, I love you, I love you— Bucky, Bucky…”

His voice died. The silent apartment was still and empty. Dust motes spun. Traffic murmured outside. He was alone. His chest was empty of anything except Bucky.

He thought about dying. Before, it had been good to die, he had been doing it to save the world as well as end his pain- whatever Reagan might think about it. Could he do it now, really do it selfishly this time? No. He had been brought back from the dead, and he had to live, he had to do what he could with his life. He’d carry on somehow. It’s what Bucky would want him to do.

But he’d promised to Bucky he’d avenge him. Like last time, when Schmidt had been sucked up into the ether and Steve felt peace settle on him, had felt Bucky smiling at him from heaven- only Bucky hadn’t been in heaven, Bucky had been lying frozen, alive, maimed and alone, and Steve should have been hunting for him, he shouldn’t have been on that plane at all…

But the point was that Steve had thought he’d avenged him.

He’d destroyed Hydra.

The world he’d saved might have gone completely to hell while he was gone, everything might be completely hopeless, there might no longer seem any way to be good and honest and honorable any more, but back then he’d done what he had to, and it had worked. He had ended the war, and he had saved the world.

He had destroyed Hydra.

He was going to save the world again. He was going to avenge Bucky again. He was going to destroy AIDS. He would have done anything, he would have sold his soul to Reagan. After going that far it was impossible to give up now. He had to find another way.

Steve lay on the couch, trying to think of a way forward. This was not the end. He would not live out his days sitting on this couch dreaming of death and lost in regret. His mind drifted back, way back, to those days spent waiting for hours in his shorts in rooms that smelled of feet and neosporin, with nerves and hope twisting up his narrow chest, glancing sideways at broad well-haired torsos and upright healthy spines, trying to stand as straight as possible when his name was called. But of course the inevitable _4F_ came regardless, stamped in strong alcohol-smelling ink that bled into that cheap fibrous paper that didn’t seem to exist any more, the kind you could see the texture of the pulp in. _4F_ , placed down with a thump that had hit painfully inside his chest but had never ever seemed final.

_It is illegal to falsify your enlistment form._

That hadn’t stopped him. 4F hadn’t stopped him.

Not even Bucky had been able to stop him.

There was no way in hell he was going to allow Reagan to stop him now. The idea was laughable.

Slowly, Steve levered himself off the couch. He knelt on to the mattress and he lowered his forehead to the pillow which didn’t smell of anything other than dust now. He pictured Bucky’s face. He pictured Reagan’s face. He pictured his own skinny face, which he always saw with a split lip. Something roared in his ears. Something was breaking, something was slipping. It had already started leaving him right here in this spot, those long few months ago.

This had started on a plane over the Atlantic Ocean above the ice. It had started in a muddy tent in Italy under the disapproving eye of Colonel Phillips. It had started in the US Army Recruitment Office at the World of Tomorrow Expo 1941. It had started in an alley a few blocks from this very apartment. Always for a better world. Always for Bucky. And now it was coming to fruition, because he had no other path.

 

When he raised his head from the pillow and let the light from the window hit his eyes, something in them was gone.

 

*

 

_October 12 th, 1984_

_Brighton, England_

 

Police cars, ambulances, fire engines, and the vans of television news crews clogged the backstreets of Brighton for several blocks around the hotel, filling the dark night with flashing lights and noise. Chaos reigned. Nobody knew where the Prime Minister was, and some hysterical people were convinced she was dead.

After some time, she appeared in the street, surrounded by security forces and, swiftly, news reporters. She was unscathed.

In the pandemonium nobody had noticed a tall man exit the hotel shortly after the blast and enter an un-marked van parked inconspicuously among the TV crews. The only unusual thing was that the van sped off almost as soon as Thatcher appeared alive and unharmed instead of entering the media scrum around her.

 

The van roared away into the night, heading for the ferry port at Dover, and then Calais, and then on into Europe, towards Russia.

Inside it, Steve Rogers prepared to meet the consequences of failing to discharge his mission.

**Author's Note:**

> I live for comments & criticism!


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